But the increasing importance of its China sales to Samsung comes as it navigates growing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing over the development of sensitive technologies. The South Korean tech giant announced last year that it was making a $40 billion investment in expanding its advanced chip manufacturing and packaging facilities in Texas, boosted by up to $6.4 billion in federal subsidies. But Samsung's contract chipmaking business has struggled to secure big US customers, bleeding market share to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which is investing "at least" $100 billion in chip fabrication plants in Arizona. "Samsung and China need each other," said CW Chung, joint head of Apac equity research at Nomura. "Chinese customers have become more important for Samsung, but it won't be easy to do business together. Samsung has also fallen behind local rival SK Hynix in the booming market for "high bandwidth memory," another crucial component in AI chips.