According to the report quoted by the Korean Central News Agency, Intel, a large chip manufacturing manufacturer, is far ahead of its competitors Samsung and Taiwan Power in R&D (R&D), with a total of more than US$16 billion. However, despite the huge investment, Intel is still struggling to launch competitive chip processing technology.
report pointed out that Intel's R&D expenditure reached about $16.55 billion. As one of the few chip manufacturers that invest in chip design and manufacturing capabilities at the same time, Intel's investment scale is unusually prominent in the semiconductor industry. These large investment amounts are mainly driven by technical breakthroughs in promoting the company's Intel 18A stage process. Previous market reports pointed out that Intel's Intel 18A stage process has problems such as uncertain yields and insufficient production capacity.
In fact, Intel has been regarded as an important asset in the US semiconductor manufacturing industry, which has also prompted the company to maintain its high R&D expenses to ensure that it can provide a powerful final solution. Under the leadership of former executive Pat Gelsinger, Intel's wafer foundry department has invested millions of dollars in its chip production process. However, from a financial perspective, Intel's large amount of capital expenditures did not bring results as expected, and its crystal foundry department has been continuously invested for several consecutive quarters. Therefore, despite the large R&D expenditure, Intel's chip manufacturing progress is still slow and has failed to keep up with the competition.
In addition to Intel, other advanced chip manufacturers have also invested heavily in R&D, showing that in competitions such as 2 nanometers, millions of dollars, or even higher financial investment. Among them, the investment in R&D in Samsung, South Korea also increased significantly in 2024, with the amount reaching US$9.5 billion, a growth of 71% compared with 2023. The growth of this investment mainly comes from related to high-level stage processes such as 2 nanometers, and integrates advanced technologies such as GAA (Gate-All-Around). However, similar to Intel, Samsung has not yet achieved expected production and results in high-level stage processes.
As for NVIDIA, a major GPU manufacturer specializing in IC design, its R&D expenditure ranking is only at Intel, reaching US$12.5 billion in 2024. NVIDIA's main partner, Taiwan Power, ranks seventh in the R&D expenditure amount of semiconductor large factories with R&D expenditure amount of US$6.36 billion.
reports indicate that these data highlight the increasingly fierce competition and high cost in the high-level chip manufacturing sector. For companies such as Intel and Samsung, despite investing millions of US dollars in R&D funds, converting these investments into competitive and high-yield advanced process technology is still the biggest challenge at the moment. Currently, because global semiconductor industries are in an era of high risks and high returns, as well as a period of technological breakthroughs and market leadership, they are expected to continue to drive these large factories to invest astronomical digital R&D funds in order to meet their expected market goals.