MediaTek Says It Is First to Announce a 2nm Phone Chip
MediaTek announced a new flagship smartphone processor, the Dimensity 9600 Pro, on Sept. 15, 2026, and said it is the first company to announce a chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process.
In its launch release, the company said the chip is designed to run AI software on the handset rather than in a data center, and that its two dedicated AI blocks can handle models of up to 30 billion parameters, a rough measure of a model's size. MediaTek said the first phones using it are expected to launch this quarter.
The release states that its performance metrics were achieved through demo device testing in MediaTek labs, and no independent benchmark of the chip has been published. On the company's own measurements, the chip reduces multi-core power consumption by 61% and carries eight processor cores in three tiers, the fastest two running at up to 4.55 GHz.
A second chip, the Dimensity 9600M, was introduced at the same event. MediaTek described it as putting flagship-level performance and power efficiency within reach of more buyers, and published no clock speeds or process details for it.
The chip is also the first MediaTek part to support LPDDR6 memory and UFS 5.0 storage, according to the release, the newer standards for the working memory and the built-in storage inside a phone.
