Semicon Briefing

Samsung and Broadcom sign a 5-year agreement worth $200 billion for HBM4/HBM4E memory and 2nm foundry production through 2030 – the largest foundry deal Samsung has ever closed. The deal is a direct attack on TSMC's monopoly in the leading-edge market and signals that Broadcom is deliberately building a second supplier for advanced chips.

Samsung and SK Group sealed supply contracts and MOUs totaling approximately $950 billion with US tech giants at a Korea-USA summit – including separate SK deals with Nvidia worth $750 billion in chips. The volume of these agreements is unprecedented and cements South Korea as a systemically critical supply chain partner for the US in the AI arms race.

Applied Materials has completed a 10-year agreement for Advanced AI Packaging with TSMC and simultaneously acquired NEXX to expand its packaging capacity. The long-term contract binds a substantial portion of AMAT's future tool demand directly to TSMC's AI foundry roadmap and strengthens competitive positioning against rivals like Lam Research.

ASML officially confirmed on July 15, 2026, that Intel Foundry is using its High-NA EUV technology for the Intel-18A process node – a milestone that technically underpins Intel's return as a foundry competitor. The partnership is strategically significant as High-NA EUV is currently used in production by only a few customers worldwide.

Infineon has finalized the purchase of ams OSRAM's non-optical analog and mixed-signal sensor business for €570 million, announced in February 2026; ams OSRAM will now focus on Digital Photonics. The acquisition is immediately EPS accretive and significantly strengthens Infineon's position in the automotive and industrial sensor market.

The US has imposed new import tariffs of 10–12.5% on goods from 60 countries – including Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea – over forced labor concerns, repricing the entire semiconductor supply chain. Simultaneously, China and the EU are striking back with their own countermeasures, raising the risk of accelerated fragmentation of global chip supply chains.