No more Asus phones, chairman confirms quitting smartphone market

After years of fighting for relevance in a brutally competitive smartphone world, Asus is officially calling it quits. The company has confirmed it will no longer produce new Android smartphones, instead throwing its weight behind the next big tech obsession: artificial intelligence.

The announcement came straight from Asus chairman Jonney Shih during the company’s “2025 Year-End Gala” earlier this month, where he reportedly told employees that the company will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future.

Cost of staying in the game

This exit also comes at a telling time. Industry analysts have been warning that manufacturing smartphones is about to get significantly more expensive, thanks to surging costs of AI-capable chips and high-performance memory components.

As phone makers race to embed AI features directly into devices, supply chain pressures are expected to drive up production costs and squeeze margins even further.

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For a player like Asus, whose smartphones have always targeted niche segments rather than mass-market volumes, that’s a tough equation.

The company seems to have decided it’s better to invest in building AI-powered hardware ecosystems than compete in a market where each new phone costs more to make and sells for less profit.

Goodbye smartphones, hello “AI everything”

Shih described the pivot as a response to what he called a “paradigm shift” driven by artificial intelligence. Asus plans to redirect its smartphone division’s resources into developing “commercial PCs and physical AI devices,” including AI robots, robotics platforms, and even AI glasses.

Asus’s decision isn’t entirely surprising. Smartphone margins have been razor-thin for years, and even tech giants like LG and HTC bowed out after struggling to stay profitable. For Asus, which already has strong footing in PCs, gaming laptops, and components, refocusing on AI-driven devices could be a smarter long-term play.

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The end of Zenfone, ROG

For fans of Asus’s compact Zenfone series, this marks the end of an era. The Taiwanese company had carved out a small but loyal corner of the Android world with phones like the Zenfone 9 and 10, devices praised for their size, clean software, and engineering finesse.

Then, there was the ROG Phone lineup, a bold and unapologetically gamer-focused series that looked like a Transformer and performed like one too.

Both series earned Asus a cult following but never quite broke into the mainstream. Against the marketing might of Samsung, Apple, and increasingly Chinese rivals like Xiaomi and OnePlus, Asus’s smartphones were boutique curiosities rather than mass-market juggernauts.

Now, it seems, the company has decided it’s time to put down the phone and pick up the neural network.