On January 5, 2026, ahead of the CES 2026 show floor opening, Samsung co-CEO TM Roh gave Reuters the company’s year-defining target: deliveries of mobile devices with Galaxy AI features will double to 800 million units this year, spanning phones and tablets. The engine inside Galaxy AI is Google’s Gemini.
That number deserves a pause from anyone building AI products. Eight hundred million units is roughly a full year of shipments for one of the world’s top phone brands. Samsung is declaring that in 2026, an “AI device” is no longer a flagship selling point but the default across the entire line — and the default model is not Samsung’s own. It is Google’s.
The 400-to-800-Million Bet
Reuters reports Samsung plans to grow Galaxy AI-equipped devices from roughly 400 million in 2025 to 800 million in 2026. TM Roh left no ambiguity: “We will apply AI to all products, all functions and all services as quickly as possible.” Il Sole 24 Ore’s coverage adds that the expansion cuts across Samsung’s complete product lineup, with Google openly celebrating the arrangement.
Place the story on the CES 2026 timeline and two AI shipping strategies run in parallel. NVIDIA’s keynote bet on physical AI — robots, autonomous vehicles, digital twins (see our NVIDIA CES 2026 physical AI coverage). Samsung bet on every phone becoming an AI device. One sells compute; the other sells installed base. Both define 2026 as the year of scale.
What Galaxy AI Actually Includes
Galaxy AI is not one feature but a bundle woven through the system: Circle to Search, live translation on calls, a writing assistant, generative photo editing, and generative wallpapers. Support already covers the Galaxy S23/S24/S25 series, the FE variants, Z Fold and Z Flip 5 through 7, and the Tab S9 through S11 tablets.
For Google, the deal is fundamentally about distribution. Gemini stops being an app you install and becomes part of the default experience on 800 million devices; CNET’s same-day report describes the devices as “powered by Google’s Gemini.” When the assistant entry point equals the OS entry point, Google has landed the position search-era companies dreamed about: the user installs nothing.
The Memory Squeeze: The Hidden Cost of 800 Million Devices
The other side of the scale commitment shows up in the supply chain. CNET reports that roughly 40% of DRAM output from Samsung and SK Hynix is projected to go to OpenAI alone, and that Apple already shipped the iPhone 16 with 16GB of RAM to run Apple Intelligence. Micron went as far as killing off Crucial, its consumer memory brand since 1996, to pivot capacity toward enterprise AI clients. Data center memory demand is crowding out consumer products: analysts expect price hikes across phones and car electronics, and even a possible return of 4GB smartphones and graphics cards trimmed to 8-12GB of memory.
The irony lands on Samsung itself: one of the world’s largest memory makers is being squeezed by the very AI demand it is stoking. On price increases, TM Roh neither committed nor ruled them out, saying only: “As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact.”
What It Means for Developers and Product Teams
First, Gemini’s distribution surface doubles in 2026. Teams building AI features for the Android ecosystem should assume the default assistant is Gemini; integrating deeply with its APIs is more pragmatic than building a substitute. Second, AI features shift from differentiator to table stakes. When 800 million devices carry a Galaxy AI badge, the premium for merely “having AI” collapses fast, and competition moves to integration depth and real-world usefulness. Third, the hardware cost floor is rising. Memory prices and capacity requirements push bill-of-materials costs up, so any hardware or app business priced on 2025 cost assumptions needs to rerun the numbers for 2026. And if component prices climb across the board, the doubling target and the margin target will start pulling against each other — worth watching in Samsung’s quarterly results.
Sources
- Samsung to double AI mobile devices to 800 million units this year — Reuters
- Samsung to Supercharge 800 Million Devices With AI This Year — CNET
- CES 2026: Samsung will bring Gemini to 800 million devices — Il Sole 24 Ore
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.