Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Samsung, newest first.
Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing said they will adopt ASML's high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, which cost up to 400 million dollars each, for memory chips in 2028 and leading-edge logic in 2030. Intel already runs them in volume. More consequentially, all three have agreed with ASML to move the industry standard photomask from six inches to twelve inches, a change ASML's chief technology officer says could lift the machines' productivity by 40 percent. SK Hynix is weighing joining the consortium. ASML remains blocked from selling these systems to China.
Mistral closed a Series D of 3 billion euros at a post-money valuation above 21 billion euros, which the company calls the largest equity round ever completed by a European technology company. Samsung Electronics led, with co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. That roughly doubles the valuation set by its ASML-led Series C back in 2025. The pitch is sovereignty: Mistral says it is the only company building open-weight models, the infrastructure and the products together, so buyers are not locked into one vendor. It names Airbus, ASML and HSBC among more than 125 enterprise customers across 20 countries.
Hot Chips 2026 produced two answers to the same problem: inference is increasingly limited by memory rather than by arithmetic. Xcena and Samsung showed the MX1, an expansion card carrying up to 2 terabytes of DDR5 alongside 3,072 small RISC-V cores, so the work happens beside the memory instead of crossing a link that tops out near 128 gigabytes per second. Samsung separately presented a processing-in-memory version of the LPDDR5X memory used in phones, reaching 614 gigabytes per second inside the chip against 76.8 gigabytes per second out of it. The Samsung part is a prototype with no ship date.
Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip on Samsung's advanced 2-nanometer process, according to The Information. The plans are preliminary — Anthropic says it is still deciding what the chip should do and how powerful it should be — and the company stressed that Google, Amazon, and Nvidia silicon will remain central to its compute stack. The move follows OpenAI's custom "Jalapeño" inference chip and underscores how frontier labs are racing to design their own hardware rather than rent it all.
President Lee Jae-myung unveiled three "mega projects" totaling roughly $880 billion over ten years — about 5 percent of the country's GDP. The package pours $518 billion into new Samsung and SK Hynix memory fabs to ease the AI-driven shortage some call "RAMageddon," funds $356 billion of AI data centers, and aims to lift South Korea's share of the humanoid-robot market from 1 percent to 20 percent, with Hyundai's Boston Dynamics mass-producing Atlas robots by 2028.
Microsoft told Axios it is exploring a self-hosted, fine-tuned version of China's DeepSeek V4 as a lower-cost engine for its new Copilot Cowork agent, possibly within weeks — an optional model run entirely on Azure, with added safeguards to reduce bias. The driver is surging inference costs, as agents make hundreds of model calls per task and OpenAI and Anthropic pull back from flat-rate pricing. In a Stratechery analysis, Ben Thompson casts the move as part of a broader pull toward China: Microsoft is strongly incentivized to use cheap, capable Chinese models, while memory makers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron may regret opening the door to Chinese chipmakers.