Credit to Wedbush Securities, the US investment bank, for spotting this one before we did.
Its analysts dug up reports in the Korean press that Samsung's foundry arm, which makes chips for other companies, is on course for smaller losses this quarter.
The broker's take: good for Samsung, not much of a story for anyone else.
Normally, stronger demand for advanced chips and less price-cutting from Samsung would be good news for the whole high-end foundry market, Wedbush said.
But TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaker, already has the vast majority of that market sewn up and charges premium prices for the privilege.
With Samsung's numbers driven mostly by its own fortunes, Wedbush sees limited ramifications for the rest of the industry.
Memory to the rescue
The unlikely saviour of Samsung's foundry business is Samsung's memory business.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM), the fast memory used in AI chips, is built by stacking layers of DRAM on top of a base die, the bottom chip that controls signals to the layers above.
For HBM4, the latest generation, Samsung makes that base die on its foundry's 4-nanometre process, so every HBM4 sale also means work for the foundry.
Samsung is the only one of the big three memory makers that also produces logic chips, the kind that handle computation and control.
It expects third-quarter HBM4 revenue to more than triple from the previous quarter.
DigiTimes, the Taiwanese trade publication, has reported that Samsung is handing more than half its 4-nanometre capacity to HBM4 base dies.
No more bargain bin
All that demand means Samsung no longer has to take cheap work to keep its lines busy, iNews24 reported.
It raised prices for new 4-nanometre orders in July and also lifted prices on 5-nanometre and 8-nanometre work, with some advanced processes going up by 10% to 15%.
That may explain why talks with Qualcomm over 2-nanometre chips have dragged on for almost nine months, with the two sides said to be arguing over price.
One industry source told iNews24 that Samsung's foundry was winning enough orders that it had no need to accept unreasonable terms.
Losses shrinking
Kiwoom Securities, the Korean broker, expects the operating loss at Samsung's foundry and System LSI division to fall to 3.92 trillion won this year from 6.74 trillion won last year.
It forecasts a third-quarter loss of 777 billion won, down from the second quarter.
Getting back into profit will depend on outside customers.
Samsung signed a memorandum of understanding with Broadcom in July covering cooperation worth more than $200 billion through 2030, and has a $16.5 billion manufacturing deal with Tesla.
The Information has also reported that Anthropic is expected to use Samsung's foundry to make AI chips.
Samsung said in July that a return to profit may be possible in the near term.
