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Memory Prices Triple, AMD Gains Ground & Samsung's 2nm Foundry Gamble
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
GDDR6 spot prices have tripled since autumn 2025, AMD is closing the CPU gap at its fastest rate in 18 months, and Anthropic's Samsung foundry bet is reshaping AI silicon supply chains. Today's briefing covers the memory crunch, foundry dynamics, and Microsoft's $2.5B enterprise AI push.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anthropic is working with Samsung on a two-nanometer custom chip, and if it holds, that's the most significant challenge to TSMC's dominance of AI silicon we've seen from a major lab. The partnership is still in early design phase.
The important distinction here is that Samsung isn't stepping in as a backup. It's positioning as a full alternative.
Running parallel to the foundry story is a memory crunch that's now forcing visible price action. AMD has raised GPU and GDDR kit prices by ten percent, effective July twenty-twenty-six.
On the processor side, AMD has reached forty-five-point-nine-nine percent of the Steam market share survey, gaining nearly fourteen percentage points since January. Intel holds fifty-four percent but the gap is closing at the fastest rate in eighteen months.
Microsoft has launched what it's calling Frontier Company, a two-point-five-billion-dollar unit with six thousand engineers embedded directly inside enterprise clients alongside partners including Accenture, PwC, and KPMG. AWS moved similarly.
The two metrics that matter most heading forward are Samsung's yield data on two-nanometer capacity and whether the GDDR shortage eases through the second half of twenty-twenty-six. If Samsung delivers yield rates that match TSMC within a reasonable margin, the foundry monopoly starts to crack.
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