An industry official said, "Samsung is understood to have informed Qualcomm of the overheating issue last month and asked for improvements by mid-October." Qualcomm, however, has yet to secure the level of thermal stability Samsung demands.
The sixth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme is Qualcomm's flagship mobile AP, unveiled last month. It focuses on boosting "agentic artificial intelligence" performance, in which a smartphone recognizes a user's situation and carries out multiple tasks on its own. With Samsung centering its next Galaxy phone on stronger AI features, securing the performance and stability of Qualcomm's AP is essential.
But with heat degrading key performance, its use in the Galaxy S27 Ultra has become uncertain. When an AP runs excessively hot, "throttling" can occur, lowering operating speeds to protect the device. That can hurt the experience of users who play games for long stretches or handle work with AI.
Samsung is in talks with Qualcomm to resolve the heat issue within this month, according to sources. If Qualcomm meets the required performance, Samsung will adopt Snapdragon as originally planned; if not, it will have little choice but to consider the Exynos 2700 as an alternative, weighing performance stability and mass-production timelines.
The Exynos 2700 is a next-generation AP designed by Samsung's System LSI business and built on SF2P, the foundry division's second-generation 2-nanometer process. Focused on improving computing performance and power efficiency over its predecessor, it is said to have outperformed Qualcomm's chip in undisclosed internal tests.
Adoption of the Exynos 2700 in next year's Galaxy S27 Ultra would mark a symbolically significant return after five years. Samsung used the Exynos 2100 in the domestic Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021 but faced controversy over overheating and performance degradation. The Exynos 2200 went into the S22 Ultra sold in Europe in 2022, but from the S23 Ultra in 2023 the company has used only Qualcomm APs. The in-house Exynos line has been limited to the domestic Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus and the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus released this year.
Picking the Exynos 2700 would also benefit Samsung's chip business. The System LSI division could increase in-house AP shipments, while the foundry division could lift utilization at its advanced 2-nanometer lines. The MX division would have room to cut spending on externally sourced APs. Samsung spent 7.44 trillion won on mobile AP purchases in the first half of this year alone.
An industry official said, "If Qualcomm cannot fix the overheating problem, the Exynos 2700 is likely to be used to meet the mass-production schedule."
