Samsung Electronics' foundry division chief told employees on June 12 that a return to profitability in the contract chipmaking business looks difficult next year, with 2028 emerging as a more likely timeline, Yonhap, ZDNet Korea, and Chosun reported.
China has recently eased controls on some indium phosphide (InP) substrates, relieving a bottleneck in optical communications capacity for the second half of the year. But supply chain players say the long-term priority is still to expand substrate capacity from non-China sources, with supply security for the AI industry outweighing price.
A South Korean media report claiming TSMC is preparing to launch panel-level packaging at mass-production scale as early as 2027 has drawn skepticism from Taiwan industry sources, who say the timeline is likely premature and that the company remains focused on evaluating multiple advanced-packaging options.
Nvidia's dominance in AI is extending beyond model training and deeper into inference—the fast-growing segment of the AI market responsible for running deployed models and generating revenue.
The semiconductor supply chain is facing another raw material shock — this time from tungsten hexafluoride, or WF6, a specialty gas used in chip manufacturing. Planned production adjustments or exits by some Japanese suppliers in the second half of 2026 have intensified concerns over tighter global supply, sending prices sharply higher and raising the risk of disruption into 2027.
