There’s at least one reason to choose the Exynos Galaxy S26 over the Snapdragon version, for now

AI has now mutated into an integral part of our devices. But brands still use a hybrid AI arrangement, where only part of the processing occurs locally, with most of the lifting done by AI models in cloud infrastructure. On-device AI on phones, for instance, has largely been limited to processing text, while richer media, such as images, are processed online. As expected, the latter approach raises privacy concerns, but Samsung could take a step toward addressing them by bringing on-device image generation to the upcoming Galaxy S26.

According to the information received by the Korean news outlet Seoul Economic Daily, Samsung’s Exynos 2600 chipset will be capable of running text-to-image generation AI models without the internet on the Galaxy S26. The feature is likely to be called EdgeFusion (translated from Korean) and is based on Stable Diffusion image-generation models. The feature is developed in partnership with the Korean AI company Nota AI, which specializes in optimizing models for lightweight deployment.

The report also notes that Samsung plans to accelerate on-device media generation in “collaboration across a wide range of global tech giants,” but without specifying which ones.

EdgeFusion is a specialized lightweight version of Stable Diffusion (version unspecified) that is “tailored for Exynos,” the report says. The report also claims the model surpasses the implementation Qualcomm previously showcased for running on Snapdragon chips. More importantly, Qualcomm showcased its chipsets’ ability to run these models; there hasn’t been a consumer-facing implementation from any major phone manufacturer, and Samsung could be the first to publicize the capability. Understably, the Exynos 2600’s enhanced 2nm architecture and a hugely improved NPU are expected to play a role here.

Based on the report, the Exynos-run model can create images with a size of 512 x 512 pixels “within seconds.”

The report does not mention whether, or how, Samsung plans to implement this on Galaxy S26 variants running the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. Samsung tends to bring similar features to models running both variants, so we hope the Snapdragon-based Galaxy S26 also gets a similar functionality. But to learn more, we’ll simply have to wait until February 25, when the phones are expected to launch.

In addition to this improvement in the image generation, Samsung is also expected to officially showcase a more advanced version of Bixby as part of the One UI 8.5 announcement, along with the Galaxy S26 series. The new version of Bixby is reportedly powered by Perplexity AI, offering better internet search functionality and smarter responses than ever.