Samsung is under growing pressure from investors over its inaction on committing to reducing fossil fuel emissions, as Apple, TSMC, and SK Hynix have done
Christian Davies / Financial Times : Tweets: @pksbertoli and @crsdavies Tweets: Per Kristian Sbertoli / @pksbertoli : It's time for @Samsung to also commit to 100% renewable energy. Good to see that @KLPkvitrer and @KiranAziz is increasing the pressure. https://www.ft.com/... Christian Davies / @crsdavies : Unlike Apple, TSMC and fellow Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, Samsung has yet to make a public commitment to 100 per cent renewable electricity use worldwide. My latest for the FT: https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The investor campaign lands at a bad moment for Samsung: the company was already reported to be losing Qualcomm and Nvidia's foundry business to TSMC amid mounting semiconductor problems, and now stands alone among the major memory and foundry players — Apple, TSMC, and fellow Korean chipmaker SK Hynix have all publicly committed to 100% renewable electricity, while Samsung has not.
Norwegian asset managers KLP and Kiran Aziz are the named voices raising the pressure, framing Samsung's silence as a governance gap rather than a technical one. The stakes are concrete because chip manufacturing accounts for most of a device's carbon output, which is why chipmakers racing to curb emissions has become a supply-chain issue, not just an environmental one.
First-order effects
- KLP and other investors are directly pressing Samsung to match the 100% renewable electricity commitments that Apple, TSMC, and SK Hynix have already made public.
- Samsung faces the reputational cost of being the outlier among its closest peers — including SK Hynix in its home market — on a commitment that has become standard.
Second-order effects
- Device makers that count manufacturing carbon in their product footprints gain one more reason to favor TSMC, compounding Samsung's foundry problem after it reportedly lost Qualcomm and Nvidia's business.
- SK Hynix's existing commitment turns the pressure into a domestic Korean comparison, making Samsung's position harder to defend to local stakeholders and regulators.
Third-order effects
- The pressure appears to have worked: months later Samsung pledged over $5B into R&D for net zero emissions across its devices business by 2030 and company-wide by 2050, though a later Greenpeace East Asia study still graded Samsung D+ with emissions rising from 2020 to 2022 — suggesting pledges are outrunning results.
- If renewable commitments harden into a de facto requirement for winning foundry orders from climate-accounting customers, laggards face a structural disadvantage that compounds over successive process generations.
The trend: Climate commitments are becoming a competitive criterion in the foundry market, with investors and device makers converting emissions pledges into commercial leverage against laggards like Samsung.