Samsung design solutions partner AD Technology claims that the customer wanted a 2.5D server part that uses Samsung's gate-all-around (GAA) transistor design which just happened to feature in its 3nm process tech.

AD Technology comes up with the design and implementation of silicon interposers used to connect compute dies, like GPUs, with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) over the shortest distance. All this hints that Samsung silicon may be used in an AI accelerator or bandwidth-constrained application.

AD Technology CEO Joon-gyu Park said that the three-nano project will be one of the largest semiconductor projects in the industry.

"I think this three-nano and 2.5D design experience will be a big weapon that will differentiate AD Technology from other companies in the future," he said.

For Samsung, the contract win is significant as much of the data centre silicon that uses advanced packaging is made by TSMC.

The question remains is who is the mysterious customer that is buying Samsung tech. A likely customer would be Nvidia which has worked with Samsung to produce several of its A-series GPUs, like A16, on an 8nm process node. But for its latest Hopper and Ada Lovelace architectures, Nvidia returned to TSMC as its silicon supplier.

However, Nvidia has had a few problems getting its most powerful chips to market and has been complaining that production of its most powerful GPUs has, according to TSMC, been held up by a lack of adequate advanced packaging capacity.

This would make a move to Samsung a possibility.

However, SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel pointed out that it's just as likely to be Broadcom, Microsoft, Amazon, AMD, Marvell – or one of the many semiconductor startups.