2025 has been a good year for Samsung fans globally, since the company’s Galaxy S25 family was entirely built around the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, with no Exynos variants in sight, and no discrimination based on regions. However, Samsung is expected to fall back to its old patterns next year, unveiling the Exynos-powered Galaxy S26 series again.
Samsung has always been criticized for positioning its weaker in-house Exynos chips side-by-side with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs, which are clearly more powerful both in terms of CPU and GPU speeds. Time and time again, reviews have shown Exynos lagging at least one generation behind the Qualcomm chips.
In regions like Europe and Asia, the Korean phone maker intentionally drops the weaker Exynos-powered Galaxy S variants as a means to save costs, which has become a point of contention for consumers. Samsung failed to yield the expected performance from Exynos 2500 this year, so it had to rely entirely on Qualcomm for its Galaxy S25 series.
According to the new rumors, the company is now working on Exynos 2600, and it’s right on track to be installed on the latest Samsung flagship mobiles in Europe. There’s a chance that Samsung might only produce this chip in a limited amount. So, other regions might still welcome the Snapdragon counterpart in 2026.
A recent report from X leaker @Jukanlosreve confirmed that Samsung is working on an Exynos 2600 chip, which is based on an SF2 2nm Gate All Around (GAA) node. From what we gathered from the leak, this new technology will help the E2600 chip gain 12% higher performance and 25% better power efficiency.
As always, the Exynos 2600 will not be able to compete with its counterpart, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2. The leaker confirms that the Galaxy S26 series in Europe will fall short of its US counterpart in terms of pure performance.
Samsung lost nearly 400 million dollars in development costs because it wasn’t able to use the Exynos 2500 chip this year. Of course, the company will try to avoid something like that happening in the future. If Samsung already has the Exynos 2600 chip in development, it will be used inside the Galaxy S26 series, even if it’s limited to a few regions. Stay tuned for more news about Galaxy S26 and the upcoming Exynos 2600.
