Samsung is aggressively expanding the role of artificial intelligence across its mobile business. The South Korean tech giant is now preparing to ship around 800 million AI-enabled smartphones and tablets this year, up from about 400 million previously, reports Reuters. The expansion is centered on Samsung’s Galaxy AI platform, with many features powered by Google’s Gemini models, as the company works to make AI a standard capability across both premium and mid-range devices.
The latest push reflects a major strategic shift inside Samsung to position AI as a core layer of the user experience rather than a headline feature limited to flagship phones. Notably, Galaxy AI includes tools like real-time language translation, advanced photo and video editing, note summarization, smart search, and context-aware assistance. And now, by extending these capabilities to a much wider range of devices, the electronics giant aims to reach hundreds of millions of users globally and integrate AI into everyday mobile use.
According to the report, the initiative is being driven by mobile co-CEO T.M. Roh, who took on the expanded leadership role late last year. Roh has highlighted that the company’s long-term competitiveness depends on rapidly integrating AI across products, services, and platforms. Under this approach, smartphones and tablets act as the primary gateway to Samsung’s wider AI ecosystem, which also spans wearables, home appliances, televisions, and connected devices.
Most importantly, Samsung’s partnership with Google plays a central role in this scale-up. By using Gemini AI models, Samsung gains access to large-language-model capabilities that support conversational features, intelligent summaries, and creative tools. Meanwhile, for Google, the collaboration offers distribution at a massive scale, embedding its AI technology deeply within the Android ecosystem at a time when competition in generative AI is intensifying.
The move also comes as the global smartphone market faces slower growth and longer device replacement cycles. According to industry estimates, global smartphone shipments for the full year 2025 increased by only around 1% year-on-year, reaching about 1.24 billion units, reflecting weak demand as consumers held on to their devices longer and manufacturers managed inventory more cautiously. At the same time, the companies are navigating rising component costs. Memory chips, which are critical for AI workloads, have seen price increases driven by strong demand from data centers and AI infrastructure. While this has benefited Samsung’s semiconductor division, it has also raised production costs for mobile devices.
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