Samsung Chip Engineers Flocking to SK Hynix

Lee is an engineer in Samsung's semiconductor division who clocks out every day after work. In the past, he often worked overtime, striving for perfection in his projects. However, recently, he goes straight home after work to prepare job applications for Samsung's South Korean rival, SK Hynix, and shares tips with colleagues on how to write outstanding personal statements. Even his boss encourages him to make the switch.

"My team leader told us all to jump ship to SK Hynix," Lee said. He and his colleagues were disheartened by the $476,000 bonus SK Hynix is about to distribute to its employees. SK Hynix achieved record profits thanks to its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which power NVIDIA AI accelerators. This figure far exceeds the bonuses Samsung chip workers are set to receive, triggering a wave of resignations.

Samsung Employees Heading to SK Hynix

As the artificial intelligence boom heats up, semiconductor giants are engaged in a fierce "war for talent," offering hefty bonuses to attract skilled professionals, and even resorting to legal action. The ultimate winner could shape the market landscape for the next generation of HBM chips, which lie at the heart of the AI surge.

"Except for our two team leaders, our entire team (30 people) applied for positions at SK Hynix," Lee said, referring to the company's job postings released in July. Lee, who has been with Samsung for three years, even applied for entry-level positions at the competitor. A colleague who had spent eight years at Samsung also applied for the same roles. Both were rejected, but they hope to receive interview invitations as SK Hynix seeks to recruit more experienced engineers.

All Samsung and SK Hynix employees interviewed by MIT Technology Review requested to be identified only by their surnames or by pseudonyms due to fears of retaliation from their employers. Samsung declined to comment, and SK Hynix did not respond to requests for comment.

After prolonged negotiations with the union, Samsung reached an agreement in May this year to distribute 10.5% of the semiconductor division's operating profit to employees annually for ten years, primarily in the form of company stock vesting over three years. Previously, SK Hynix had agreed last year to distribute 10% of its operating profit to employees, meaning each employee will receive a bonus of $476,000 this year, mainly in cash.

However, at Samsung, bonuses for each department are tied to its own profitability. Chip workers in its memory division, who benefit significantly from producing HBM chips, can receive bonuses of approximately $400,000 each this year. But employees like Lee Kun-hee (pseudonym), who work in Samsung's foundry division producing logic chips designed for companies like Tesla and Google—a division that has consistently operated at a loss—will only receive bonuses of around $135,000.

Employees told MIT Technology Review that Samsung stated it could not issue such large bonuses to underperforming divisions. After witnessing months of struggle between the union and the company, Lee Kun-hee expressed disappointment with the final outcome: "Even if Samsung performs well in the future, I don't think any benefits will reach me."

The lag in employee bonuses has suddenly made SK Hynix appear quite attractive. A June survey by the Samsung Union showed that 81.5% of employees in the company's foundry division, and nearly half of the entire semiconductor division, expressed a desire to switch to other companies within the next two years. In April, Samsung Union Chairman Choi Seung-ho stated that over 200 union members had moved to SK Hynix in the previous four months. On the anonymous workplace forum Blind, many disgruntled Samsung engineers admitted they wanted to move to SK Hynix for higher bonuses.

For decades, SK Hynix lived in Samsung's shadow. This smaller, slower-growing memory manufacturer was often overlooked by top engineering students during job hunts. However, in 2019, Samsung scaled back its HBM team, betting the market would remain niche, while SK Hynix doubled down on the technology. Subsequently, the booming development of AI greatly drove demand for HBM, a type of memory capable of supplying massive amounts of data to AI chips at ultra-high speeds, pushing prices to unprecedented heights. Today, SK Hynix leads the global HBM market, while Samsung struggles to catch up. Both companies saw their market capitalizations surpass the $1 trillion mark in May, with SK Hynix briefly overtaking Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company in June.

Anticipating a continued surge in demand for memory chips, semiconductor giants are actively investing to expand their operations. Last month, these companies announced plans to invest over $2 trillion by 2040, including the creation of a semiconductor "super cluster" in Yongin, south of Seoul. To meet expansion needs, SK Hynix added 2,152 new employees in the first half of 2026 alone and plans to double its capacity within five years. Samsung plans to hire 60,000 employees over the next five years, particularly within its semiconductor division. Even so, the talent pool remains insufficient: according to forecasts by the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, the South Korean semiconductor industry will require approximately 304,000 workers by 2031, currently facing a shortfall of about 54,000 workers.

Now, these two old rivals are distributing huge bonuses to retain talent and poach from each other. "SK Hynix seems to specifically target Samsung engineers during recruitment because Samsung is their competitor," said Mr. Baek, a manager at SK Hynix. "According to my internal sources, the high performance bonuses we receive are intended to poach talent from competitors."

Courts have begun to intervene. In July this year, Samsung won an injunction prohibiting two former chip workers from working at SK Hynix for 18 months, citing that chips are core national technologies deserving protection. "Competition in the semiconductor industry is extremely intense, making it necessary to establish a fair market order," the court ruled.

Brain drain threatens Samsung's critical advantage in the HBM race. "Samsung is the only memory manufacturer in the world with foundry operations," said Park Jun-young (phonetic translation), a semiconductor expert at the Industrial Anthropology Laboratory, a research institution, who previously worked at Samsung for ten years.

The latest generation technology, HBM4, requires that the logic chips at the bottom of each memory stack be manufactured using advanced processes only foundries can complete. Samsung can handle this manufacturing internally, whereas SK Hynix outsources it to the Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC. "If Samsung's foundry engineers continue to leave... collaboration between the memory division and the foundry could become difficult," Mr. Park stated. "SK Hynix previously only had a memory team but is now also recruiting foundry engineers, allowing for better HBM research."

Mr. Choi, an engineer who has worked at Samsung for seven years, said he was once a star employee praised by managers. However, recently, he and his colleagues have been busy applying for every job opening at SK Hynix. "We inform each other about the latest job postings at SK Hynix," he said. "There is always more work to do beyond basic duties, but it feels meaningless to do it."

Micron Employees Rumored to Be Planning Strike

Meanwhile, according to a post on the Taiwanese social media platform Dcard, workers at Micron's Taoyuan factory in Taiwan held meetings to discuss a potential strike due to unfair bonuses. Workers decided to convene to discuss bonus issues arising from the AI wave and plan to explore whether the current bonus policy, equivalent to 200% of employee performance achievement, is sufficient to compete with policies at other companies (such as Samsung).

Rumors suggest that the union has held strike briefing sessions, but related actions have not yet been officially confirmed.

According to screenshots from online forums (such as Dcard and PTT) attached to the Jukan post, the Micron union held two "Union Strike Briefing Sessions" in Guishan, Taoyuan, on the evening of July 30. These sessions aimed to answer grassroots colleagues' questions about the union and discuss information on labor rights, such as how to exercise the right to strike.

Earlier this year, employees at South Korean memory manufacturer Samsung went on strike, making headlines due to dissatisfaction with low bonuses despite the booming AI sector. They pointed out that the bonus policy of Samsung's competitor, SK Hynix, stood in stark contrast to the booming AI market, indicating that Samsung's current bonus levels were insufficient to meet employee needs.

As part of their demands, Samsung employee Jo requested management to remove the bonus cap, issue bonuses equivalent to 15% of the semiconductor business's operating profit, and increase annual salaries. After some bargaining, management and the union finally reached an agreement where employees would receive bonuses equivalent to 10.5% of operating profit, no longer subject to the 50% bonus cap (which had previously limited bonuses to 50% of salary).

Rumors indicate that Micron Taiwan's annual performance bonus system has a cap of 200% (maximum of five months), with actual payouts reportedly around only 2.6 months. Coupled with relatively slow growth in salary adjustments and benefits, this has led to a sharp increase in feelings of relative deprivation among grassroots employees in Taiwan; this significant disparity in treatment has become a key trigger for the recent surge in Micron union membership.

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