Qualcomm has put a long-running rumour on the record. Chris Patrick is the company’s senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets. Speaking at Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui on September 22, he said Qualcomm is evaluating Samsung Foundry’s 2nm process for future chips.
What Patrick said about Samsung’s 2nm process
Patrick described Samsung as Qualcomm’s strongest partner in the global mobile industry, per The Elec’s report from the summit. On the process node itself, he said:
We are taking a deep look at how we can leverage 2nm technology for our next-generation products.
That is an evaluation, not a decision. Patrick named no chip, launch window or timeline. The work sits at a preliminary evaluation and review stage.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips are TSMC-made
This part is worth being blunt about. Rumours earlier in 2026 suggested Samsung would fabricate Qualcomm’s next flagship silicon. That did not happen. Both the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 are built by TSMC. An evaluation of Samsung’s 2nm process tells you nothing about the chips shipping in phones today.
The wider Qualcomm and Samsung relationship
The foundry question is only one strand of it. Qualcomm is separately working with Samsung’s memory division to bring LPDDR6 to mobile devices. The target there is the memory bottleneck that on-device AI workloads create.
The two companies already ship hardware together. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 run Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite silicon. Samsung’s upcoming smart glasses are built around the same platform. None of that bears on the foundry decision.
What it means for buyers
In the near term, nothing changes. Foundry choices take years to reach a retail phone. The longer-term interest is competitive. A second credible leading-edge foundry affects chip pricing and availability over time, which eventually feeds into phone prices. Nothing in Patrick’s remark is concrete enough to predict that yet.
