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The ongoing “AI revolution” in the tech industry heavily relies on NVIDIA hardware, particularly its GPUs, in data center acceleration. Yet, maintaining this market position demands continuous strategic evolution. NVIDIA currently faces a significant headwind: many of its key partners and competitors—including technology giants like Google, OpenAI, and AWS—are actively designing custom, in-house silicon. Their clear objective is simple: reduce reliance on NVIDIA’s widely demanded accelerators. In a strategic response, NVIDIA recently confirmed a crucial partnership with Samsung Foundry. This move intends to move past solely supplying GPUs and instead embeds its technology across the entire AI hardware stack. Rumors had already emerged about a potential shift by the company towards this path. However, the official move makes the company’s intentions public. NVIDIA leverages Samsung Foundry to secure custom AI CPU supply The foundation of this strategy rests on expanding NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem. This technology is designed for direct, high-speed communication between various processors—CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators (XPUs)—within massive data center systems. NVIDIA recently integrated x86 CPUs into this framework through a collaboration with Intel. Now, by bringing Samsung into the fold, the company secures a partner uniquely positioned to offer a full, design-to-production solution. Samsung Foundry provides extensive expertise across the semiconductor lifecycle. Its factories will enable NVIDIA to design and manufacture custom, non-x86 CPUs and specialized XPUs. Crucially, these new chips are specifically optimized to communicate seamlessly with NVIDIA’s main platforms. This partnership is more than a technical arrangement. It also represents a calculated strategy to tighten NVIDIA’s market control. Custom silicon developed under the NVLink Fusion umbrella operates with a key restriction: these chips must connect exclusively to NVIDIA products. This means that NVIDIA will manage the core IP, communication controllers, and switch licensing. This way, the company is establishing itself as an essential central component. Even if companies design their own specialized chips, those components must increasingly rely on NVIDIA’s architecture to achieve peak performance within modern AI data centers. Samsung Foundry becomes key ally The arrangement benefits both firms in major ways. For Samsung, the deal results in a new economic and confidence boost for its Foundation division. The South Korean giant is securing another major client after achieving this with xAI and even supplying Qualcomm with high-end Snapdragon chips for testing ahead of possible mass production. For NVIDIA, the partnership ensures rapid scaling of custom, high-performance solutions to remain at the top of the AI sector. This collaboration makes clear a strategic shift from NVIDIA. The firm wants to stop being a simple component supplier and become the fundamental architect of the AI computing infrastructure. If it goes well, the move will ensure that NVIDIA technologies remain pivotal in the future of artificial intelligence.
