Samsung is reportedly planning to enter the PC chip market once more with a new AI-focused accelerator. According to the Korea Economic Daily, the firm’s System LSI unit is working on a PC-oriented AI chip named Gaia. Early prototypes have been sent to Lenovo and HP for evaluation, and full-scale production could start in 2027.

Well-known Samsung leaker Ice Universe called the effort the company’s return to PC processors after about 13 years. Yet the information suggests something different from a standard laptop processor. Gaia appears to be a specialized companion chip meant to manage artificial intelligence tasks instead of fully replacing an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm CPU.

Gaia would sit beside your PC’s main processor

Samsung will reportedly build Gaia on a 4-nanometer process. Its design centers on an optimized neural processing unit, or NPU, that can speed up generative AI and other on-device workloads without constant cloud reliance. The company is also looking at integration with processing-in-memory technology.

PIM allows certain calculations to occur directly inside memory, cutting down on data movement between the processor and RAM. This approach could let Samsung pair Gaia with its own memory products and gain more control over key parts of the AI computing chain.

Many important details are still missing. The report does not disclose Gaia’s AI performance, power use, or other critical specs. As a result, direct comparisons to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 processors or Nvidia’s more powerful RTX Spark platform are not yet possible. Still, a dedicated discrete accelerator could let PC makers add stronger local AI features without redesigning an entire laptop around a new processor architecture.

This is not the first time Samsung has made PC chips

Besides acting as a chip foundry for companies like Nvidia and AMD, Samsung has a PC silicon history that goes back more than a decade. Its Exynos 5 chips powered some Chromebooks in the early 2010s.

Today, Samsung’s Galaxy Book laptops mainly use processors from Intel and Qualcomm. The recently announced Galaxy Book6 Edge, for instance, relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite. Gaia could eventually give Samsung a proprietary component in that hardware lineup once again.