Samsung workers eyeing SK Hynix have turned a pay dispute into a hiring problem for South Korea’s biggest chipmaker, according to MIT Technology Review interviews with employees at both companies. Engineers in Samsung’s semiconductor business told the publication they are applying to its rival after SK Hynix’s AI-memory profits produced far larger bonuses for many staff.
One Samsung engineer identified as Lee said he now leaves at the end of his shift to work on applications to SK Hynix, rather than putting in extra hours on projects. He said nearly all of his roughly 30-person team applied to a July SK Hynix posting, including people with several years of Samsung experience who even tried for entry-level roles. Lee said he and a coworker were rejected from that posting but hoped to be considered for a more senior opening.
MIT Technology Review said the Samsung and SK Hynix employees it interviewed used only surnames or pseudonyms because they feared retaliation. Samsung declined to comment to the publication, and SK Hynix did not respond to requests for comment.
Why are Samsung workers applying to SK Hynix?
The immediate reason is bonus math. Samsung agreed in May, after talks with its union, to pay semiconductor-division employees 10.5% of the division’s operating profit each year for 10 years, mostly as stock that vests over three years, Bloomberg reported. SK Hynix agreed last year to pay 10% of operating profit to employees, which Bloomberg said works out to $476,000 per worker this year, mostly in cash.
Samsung’s internal split is the sore point. Its memory workers are due about $400,000 each this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Workers in Samsung’s foundry division, which makes logic chips designed by customers such as Tesla and Google and has been losing money, are due about $135,000, according to The Korea Herald. Employees told MIT Technology Review that Samsung has said it cannot pay the same bonuses to underperforming divisions.
A June survey by Samsung’s labor union found that 81.5% of foundry-division employees and almost half of semiconductor-division employees said they wanted to move to another company within two years, according to Dong-A Ilbo. In April, union chief Choi Seung-ho said more than 200 union members had moved to SK Hynix in the prior four months, KBS reported.
What is HBM, and why does it change the hiring fight?
High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is the memory used to feed AI accelerators large amounts of data at very high speed. Nvidia’s AI systems have helped push demand for those chips, and SK Hynix has become the market leader after Samsung reduced its HBM team in 2019, according to MIT Technology Review.
Samsung is now trying to catch up. Reuters reported that both Samsung and SK Hynix passed $1 trillion in market value in May, and Fortune reported that SK Hynix briefly became South Korea’s most valuable company in June.
The companies are also expanding hard. They announced plans last month to invest more than $2 trillion by 2040, including a semiconductor cluster in Yongin, south of Seoul. SK Hynix added 2,152 employees in the first half of 2026 and aims to double manufacturing capacity within five years, according to Seoul Economic Daily and MBC. Samsung plans to hire 60,000 people over five years, with emphasis on semiconductors. The Korea Semiconductor Industry Association estimates the country’s chip sector will need about 304,000 workers by 2031 and face a shortfall of roughly 54,000.
The fight has reached court. In July, Samsung won an injunction stopping two former chip workers from joining SK Hynix for 18 months, with the court citing protection for national core technology, The Korea Herald reported.
Park Jun-young, a semiconductor expert at the Industrial Anthropology Laboratory and a former Samsung employee, told MIT Technology Review that Samsung’s foundry arm remains a rare advantage because HBM4 needs an advanced logic chip at the base of each memory stack. Park said Samsung can make that component internally, while SK Hynix uses TSMC, but continued losses of foundry engineers could weaken Samsung’s collaboration between memory and logic teams.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
