There’s an interesting rumor about Switch 2’s manufacturing.
Bloomberg reports on Samsung’s partnership with Nintendo for the Switch 2’s SOC. Nintendo has confirmed that they are using a customized SOC supplied by Nvidia, but not that that SOC is being manufactured for the two companies in Samsung’s foundries.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, Samsung has enough capacity to manufacture 20 million Switch 2 SOCs by March 2026, the end of this financial year. However, Nintendo may not be able to ship or sell 20 million Switch 2 units by that point. It depends on Nintendo’s capacity to assemble their Switch 2 consoles. Bloomberg mentions Foxconn, but as we know, Nintendo has non-Foxconn manufacturing partners as well, like Hosiden facilities in Vietnam.
Bloomberg also cites the Chosunbiz report we shared last week, that discussed other rumors about Samsung’s deal to make Nintendo’s SOCs. As we pointed out in translation, while Samsung’s 8nm process is less powerful than their 5nm process, the power gap is not that wide. 8nm was a better overall choice because Samsung could make more units, and they could be sold for cheaper.
Bloomberg does point out that this was a win for Samsung over their competitors in the foundry business. That includes TSMC, the market leader in the industry, but also the struggling newcomer in Intel. TSMC’s foundries made the SOC for the original Switch for Nvidia and Nintendo. Longtime observers will remember that Nintendo occasionally had problems with SOC supply, because TSMC was also making chips for other clients, and that would be nearly the rest of the tech industry. So this pivot to Samsung, at least in theory, means that Nintendo has a dedicated foundry partner that will give them a steady supply.
It’s certainly interesting to think about how Nintendo, based in Japan, has assembled partnerships across Asia for the Switch 2. Samsung is Korean, Foxconn is a Taiwanese company doing most of its business in mainland China, and Hosiden, who does a lot of business in Vietnam, is also Japanese. For the record, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is Taiwanese-American, the company is American, founded in 1993 in San Francisco, California.
Nintendo isn’t particularly unique or special for making this arrangement, but it should drive home how dependent Nintendo, and the game industry in general, is on being part of a global economy. It also stands to reason why Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa sounded the alarm on how US tariffs could harm consumers, so that they would struggle to buy daily necessities. Notably, he brought up this entirely human concern to convince investors they wouldn’t hastily increase the Switch 2 price just to compensate for tariffs.
As we’ve seen that US seems to have toned down the severity and implementation of their tariff plans, the global economy is still figuring out how it will all finally reflect on prices and costs. While tariffs remain a potential source of uncertainty, at least Nintendo can depend on some partners, like Nvidia and Samsung.
