RE: Samsung To Produce ASIC Chips For Chinese Miners
Actually this is a topic in which I have a serious background.
Samsung started to provide foundry (semiconductor fabrication plant operation) services. In microelectronics, this means that a company using it's manufacturing infrastructure and the know-how of it's manufacturing processes to produce designs of their customers.
Most of the modern semiconductor industry is using this model, with huge foundries like TSMC, Global Foundry, UMC, and several others...
But this does not mean that Samsung is entering the world of ASIC mining hardware, or that it's partnership with designers of mining hardware. They just load their production lines with designs of others. Actually they offered foundry services in the past, and if you check wikipedia, in 2013 they earned 4 billion USD out of it.