This year’s flagship Galaxy S25 family has entirely been powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset by Qualcomm, no matter where you live, due to the yield issues with Samsung’s own Exynos 2500 SoC.
This has been rumored to change next year, and today yet another rumor ‘confirms’ (as much as any rumor can) that the Galaxy S26 models will have the Exynos 2600 chipset inside – but, due to yield issues, these Exynos-powered S26 units might only be launching in Europe.
For a while Europe has been Samsung’s preferred market for Exynos chips, and it remains a mystery why. But if this rumor pans out, it’s looking like Europe will once again get the short end of the performance stick, as the same source claims the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will be ahead of the Exynos 2600, unsurprisingly.
Interestingly, Samsung’s System LSI division, which designed the Exynos 2500, is said to have incurred an estimated loss of around $400 million from the fact that Samsung hasn’t used that chip in the S25 family. So the company obviously wouldn’t want something like that repeated.