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Strategy
The silent surge: How Samsung’s “boring” strategy paid off
Samsung’s silent, disciplined approach to solving an embarrassing chip problem has turned it into a decisive winner in the AI era, writes Howard Yu. The company’s renewed success demonstrates why quiet execution trumps loud ambition
In today’s algorithm-driven world, we are obsessed with “loud” leadership. We track Elon Musk’s latest public brawls and Mark Zuckerberg’s “done apologizing” tours because, in the current media landscape, volume seems to masquerade as value. But as business historian Martin Gutmann argues, we often confuse a good story with good leadership.
Gutmann’s research on polar explorers makes the point vividly. Ernest Shackleton’s legendary rescue mission after his ship, Endurance, got stuck in ice in Antarctica, has become one of history’s great adventure stories. However, despite the hype around Shackleton’s exploits, it was the detail-obsessed Norwegian Roald Amundsen who reached the South Pole first in 1911, some four years earlier than Endurance’s ill-fated mission. Amundsen’s diaries? “Almost boring,” Gutmann notes. “No melodrama, no near-death cliffhangers. There were just checklists, weather notes, and incremental progress.” The takeaway: exciting stories are usually the result of poor decisions, while good leadership and discipline make drama disappear.
This is the story of how Samsung Electronics, by choosing the boring path of preparation and method over the loud theater of crisis, recovered from failing a critical chip qualification test to reclaim its throne.
Samsung Electronics has long been a global leader in memory chip manufacturing. It has consistently held the largest global market share in DRAM and NAND flash chips. These are essential components for the smooth functioning of PCs, servers, smartphones, and storage devices. The company started as a leader in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market, a key component in the graphics processing unit-based (GPU) accelerators that power AI innovation globally. But, in 2024 and 2025, it found itself falling behind its competitors.
Unlike its key chip-making rivals, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, Samsung’s HBM chips initially failed Nvidia’s qualification tests due to excessive heat and power consumption. Its market share slipped to just 17%, compared with SK Hynix’s 62% and Micron Technology’s 21%. Since Nvidia dominates the GPU-based accelerator market, Samsung Electronics faced a do-or-die moment in a sector evolving at breakneck speed.
Samsung, the Amundsen of silicon
In the face of this challenge, Samsung went quiet. There was no “visionary strategy,” no dramatic pivots, no CEO making headlines with bold turnaround pronouncements – just engineers knuckling down to solve heat dissipation problems, one failed test at a time, until they didn’t fail anymore.
Behind the scenes, the pressure was real: new chip chief Jun Young-hyun warned in an internal memo that Samsung risked a vicious cycle if it kept hiding or avoiding problems. “We need to rebuild the culture of fierce debate that is unique to semiconductors,” he wrote in a staff memo. The company retreated into 18 months of development and repeated attempts. In September 2025, Samsung finally passed Nvidia’s qualification tests.
Samsung seized the moment, cutting prices to win new chip customers, including Tesla, IBM, and Nintendo, and moving aggressively toward its next-generation 2nm chips. It has also launched an AI Computing Lab to design its own processors for future workloads.
The payoff was immediate and significant. In the third quarter of 2025, Samsung boasted 12.1tn KRW ($8.5bn) in operating profits, its best quarter in over three years. Revenue hit an all-time high of 86tn KRW ($58bn). Samsung was back with a bang at the top of the memory chip maker charts.
This is just the beginning. The requirement for memory to meet the needs of the AI chips powered by the likes of Nvidia, AMD, and Google is expected to reach unimaginable levels in 2026, and global supply is not expected to match demand. Samsung, Micron Technology, and SK Hynix, which together control nearly all of the RAM market, are all set to be big winners.
When ambition outpaces execution
Meanwhile, Intel provides a cautionary tale of ambition outpacing execution. For many years, it was at the forefront of semiconductor manufacturing technology, producing chips using the most advanced, smallest, and highest-performance fabrication nodes, pushing new nodes on schedule while rivals lagged.
But a series of missteps over the last 20 years saw the company fall behind. Recently, it has made big declarations around regaining process leadership through its “five nodes in four years” strategy, launched in 2021, and about becoming the world’s second-largest foundry by 2030.
However, despite these bold public commitments, the company reported a net loss of $18.8bn in 2024 – its worst year ever. This collapse came after two of its chip nodes, the 10nm and 7nm, were delayed by several years.
“I think we lost the discipline of cycle time,” said Intel’s Client Computing Head Jim Johnson, who joined the company more than 30 years ago. “Cycle time requires you to commit and deliver, and we started talking ourselves into, ‘Hey, we can have longer cycle times and try and lift more or do more.’”
Intel’s vaunted comeback strategy was further stalled when its new 18A chip technology, meant to rival TSMC and Samsung, simply didn’t work. Yields were around 10%, far below the 70% needed to make money. Projects were delayed or cancelled, two factories in Europe were shelved, and tens of thousands of jobs were cut. Its AI chip, Gaudi 3, failed to dent Nvidia’s dominance. Even its flagship PC chips had to be outsourced to TSMC, a symbolic blow to a company built on making its own products.
In January 2026, the company reported that it had entered high-volume production of 18A, but no outside buyers have emerged as it struggles to win back customer trust in its ability to deliver on its promises.
What Samsung teaches us about future readiness
Samsung’s careful return to form reminds us that future readiness isn’t about making noise. Like Amundsen, its monastic, disciplined execution – fixing HBM flaws and passing Nvidia’s tests – turned it into a decisive winner in the AI era. And like Shackleton, Intel has struggled to live up to its proclaimed ambitions and suffered the consequences. The takeaway? Lead quietly, win loudly.
3 key lessons from Samsung’s quiet victory
1 – Stay focused on the discipline of execution
Excellence lies in fixing issues, meeting deadlines, and delivering products. Samsung exemplified this by focusing on problem-solving and product delivery while avoiding high-visibility decelerations and knee-jerk pivots.
2 – Be patient when it comes to technology
Breakthroughs often require incremental progress and resilience. Innovation often comes after setbacks. Samsung’s 18-month journey through failure and refinement underscores the importance of not giving up prematurely and of staying the course until capabilities are sound.
3 – Steadiness builds trust externally
Establish trust with partners and customers at the exact moment demand explodes. Passing Nvidia’s qualification tests after quiet, sustained effort allowed Samsung to reestablish credibility at the exact moment demand exploded.
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