The contest over AI chips is increasingly becoming a contest over people. At Samsung and SK Hynix, the race to build high-bandwidth memory chips has spilled into pay packages, hiring campaigns, workplace morale and even the courts.
The pressure is especially visible inside Samsung’s semiconductor division, where some engineers now see SK Hynix as the better bet. Their calculations are not only about prestige or technology. They are about bonuses, momentum and where future gains from the AI boom may land.
Bonus gaps are changing the talent map
Lee, an engineer in Samsung’s semiconductor division, used to stay late to push his projects forward. Now, when his shift ends, he goes home and works on applications to SK Hynix. He also shares advice with coworkers on how to write a stronger personal statement.
The shift is not just private frustration. Lee says even his boss has encouraged employees to leave. As he put it, “My team lead tells us all to jump ship to SK Hynix.”
The immediate reason is compensation. SK Hynix is set to pay employees a $476,000 bonus after record profits from high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM, used in Nvidia’s AI accelerators. That payout is far above what some Samsung chip workers expect to receive.
Samsung reached a deal in May after prolonged talks with its labor union. Under that agreement, the company will pay 10.5% of the semiconductor division’s operating profits to employees as annual bonuses for 10 years, mostly in stock that vests over three years. SK Hynix, by comparison, agreed last year to pay employees 10% of operating profits, which translates to $476,000 per employee this year and is mostly in cash.
Inside Samsung, the picture differs by division. Samsung’s memory division, which is benefiting from HBM demand, is paying roughly $400,000 per employee this year. Lee works in Samsung’s foundry division, which makes logic chips designed by companies such as Tesla and Google and has been operating at a loss. Workers there are set to receive roughly $135,000.
Samsung workers are looking outward
Employees told MIT Technology Review that Samsung has said it cannot provide the same level of bonuses to divisions that are not performing as well. For workers who see the AI chip boom creating large rewards elsewhere, that explanation has not ended the frustration.
Lee said he came away disappointed after watching months of negotiations between the labor union and the company. His conclusion was blunt: “Even if Samsung does well in the future, I don’t think any of it will trickle down to me.”
That mood is showing up in applications. Lee said that, apart from two team leads, his entire team of 30 people applied to SK Hynix after a job posting appeared in July. He has worked at Samsung for three years and even applied for an entry-level role at SK Hynix. A coworker with eight years at Samsung applied for the same position. Both were rejected, but Lee remains hopeful about a role for a more experienced engineer.
Other signs point in the same direction:
- A June survey by the Samsung labor union found that 81.5% of employees in Samsung’s foundry division wanted to move to another company within the next two years.
- Nearly half of employees in Samsung’s semiconductor division as a whole said the same.
- In April, Samsung labor union chief Choi Seung-ho said more than 200 union members had left for SK Hynix over the previous four months.
- On Blind, an anonymous workplace forum, Samsung engineers have discussed wanting to defect to SK Hynix for larger bonuses.
All Samsung and SK Hynix employees who spoke with MIT Technology Review asked to be identified only by last name or pseudonym because they feared retaliation. Samsung declined to comment, and SK Hynix did not respond to requests for comment.
HBM turned SK Hynix into a stronger magnet
For decades, SK Hynix was seen as the smaller memory maker standing behind Samsung. Elite engineering students often looked first to Samsung when applying for jobs. But the HBM market changed the balance.
In 2019, Samsung reduced the size of its HBM team because it expected the market to remain niche. SK Hynix moved in the opposite direction and committed more deeply to the technology. Then the AI boom increased demand for HBM chips, which provide AI chips with huge amounts of data at very high speed.
That demand pushed prices to unprecedented levels and helped SK Hynix take the lead in the global HBM market. Samsung is now trying to catch up. Both companies surpassed $1 trillion in market value in May, and SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company in June.
The investment plans show how large the stakes have become. Last month, the companies announced plans to invest more than $2 trillion by 2040, including a semiconductor “mega-cluster” in Yongin, south of Seoul. SK Hynix added 2,152 employees in the first half of 2026 and aims to double its manufacturing capacity in five years. Samsung plans to hire 60,000 employees over the next five years, with a focus on its semiconductor division.
Even that may not be enough. According to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, South Korea’s semiconductor industry will need about 304,000 workers by 2031 and faces a shortage of roughly 54,000.
The fight has reached the courtroom
The competition is no longer limited to job postings and bonuses. In July, Samsung won an injunction preventing two former chip workers from working at SK Hynix for 18 months. The decision was based on the argument that chips are a national core technology requiring protection.
The court said, “With competition in the semiconductor industry fierce, it’s necessary to establish a fair market order.”
That legal move underlines how sensitive talent movement has become. In a field where specific expertise can influence research, manufacturing and product timing, losing engineers can affect more than staffing charts.
Samsung still has one important structural advantage in the HBM race. Park Jun-young, a semiconductor expert at the Industrial Anthropology Laboratory who worked at Samsung for a decade, said Samsung is the only memory maker in the world with its own foundry business.
That matters for HBM4, the latest generation of the technology. The logic chip at the base of each memory stack must be made with an advanced process that only foundries run. Samsung can handle that work internally, while SK Hynix outsources it to TSMC.
But Park warned that the advantage could weaken if Samsung keeps losing foundry engineers. Coordination between Samsung’s memory and foundry divisions could become harder, while SK Hynix could strengthen its HBM research by hiring foundry talent.
Choi, a Samsung engineer of seven years, described a similar collapse in motivation. He said he had once received strong performance reviews, but he and his coworkers now watch for SK Hynix openings and apply when they appear. “There’s always more work to do beyond our basic duties. But there’s no point in doing it.”