Samsung has ordered Galaxy S27 Ultra motherboards designed around its own Exynos 2700 processor.
The Korean publication MoneyToday reported the order, and its account is the only one so far. An Exynos in the Ultra would be the first since the Galaxy S22 Ultra in 2022.
It also undoes the one part of Samsung's chip plan that looked decided. Samsung was expected to put the Exynos 2700 in the base S27 and the S27+, built on its own second-generation 2nm manufacturing process, and to buy Qualcomm's Snapdragon for the S27 Pro and the S27 Ultra in every market.
The Ultra was the exception.
Snapdragon development for the Ultra was close to finished when the Exynos version was added, according to a person MoneyToday spoke to. That source read the late addition as a measure of how much Samsung now expects from its own silicon. Ordering a second set of boards for a phone you have already engineered around somebody else's chip is not a cheap change of mind.
Estimates put the Exynos 2700 about 19% ahead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 on Geekbench 6.5 multi-core, and 9.5% ahead of the higher-end Pro version, with stronger graphics at lower power draw. None of those figures has been verified outside Samsung, and they describe a chip rather than a finished phone.
Qualcomm isn't being pushed out of the Ultra. Snapdragon versions are still in development, the United States is still expected to get them, and markets such as Korea would take the Exynos instead. Samsung has run that division before. The Galaxy S22 Ultra shipped with the Exynos 2200 in Europe, the UK and parts of the Middle East and Africa, and with Qualcomm's chip in the United States.
The split decides what is in the box. An S27 Ultra bought in Korea would run a different processor from an S27 Ultra bought in the United States, under one name, and the reviews of one would be describing the other. Samsung has said nothing about any of it, and the phone is still months from launch.