Samsung's Chip Engineers Are Quietly Applying to the Rival Paying Them $340,000 More
SK Hynix's record AI-chip bonuses have set off a talent exodus at Samsung. The fallout could reshape who wins the race to build the memory chips inside every major AI system.
Key points - SK Hynix is paying each employee roughly $476,000 in bonuses in 2025, fuelled by record profits from AI memory chips. - Samsung's foundry-division engineers receive around $135,000, a gap of more than $340,000 compared to their SK Hynix counterparts. - A Samsung union survey from June 2026 found 81.5% of foundry-division staff wanted to leave within two years. - Samsung won a court injunction in July 2026 blocking two former chip engineers from joining SK Hynix for 18 months. - South Korea's semiconductor industry faces a projected shortfall of roughly 54,000 workers by 2031, making every defection count.
Lee clocks out the moment his shift ends. He used to stay late. These days he goes straight home, opens his laptop, and gets his SK Hynix application ready. His boss doesn't just tolerate it.
What is driving engineers out the door?
Money, plainly. SK Hynix is handing each of its employees roughly $476,000 in bonuses this year, funded by the enormous profits the company makes selling HBM chips, short for high-bandwidth memory, the specialised memory that feeds vast amounts of data into Nvidia's AI processors at extreme speed. Samsung engineers in the foundry division, which makes chips designed by outside companies like Tesla and Google, are receiving around $135,000. That division has been running at a loss.
The gap is more than $340,000 per person.
"Except for our two team leads, my entire team of 30 people just applied to SK Hynix," Lee told MIT Technology Review. He has worked at Samsung for three years and applied for an entry-level role at the rival. A colleague with eight years of experience applied for the same post. The application was rejected. Both are now hoping for a callback on a more senior listing.
| Division / Company | Approximate 2025 bonus per employee |
|---|---|
| SK Hynix (all staff) | $476,000 |
| Samsung memory division | ~$400,000 |
| Samsung foundry division | ~$135,000 |
A Samsung union survey from June found 81.5% of foundry workers wanted to leave within two years. Union chief Choi Seung-ho said more than 200 members had already defected to SK Hynix in just four months.
Does this affect the AI chips inside your devices?
Possibly, yes. HBM chips sit at the heart of every major AI accelerator, the processors that run large language models, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT. SK Hynix currently leads the global market after Samsung pulled back its own HBM team in 2019, wrongly betting demand would stay small.
The next generation of the technology, called HBM4, requires a new type of logic chip at the base of each memory stack, one that only advanced chip foundries can produce. Samsung is the only memory maker on the planet that runs its own foundry, giving it a theoretical edge for HBM4. Lose the foundry engineers and that edge goes with them.
"If Samsung keeps losing engineers in the foundry, the collaboration between memory division and foundry division could become difficult," said Park Jun-young, a semiconductor researcher who spent a decade at Samsung.
SK Hynix, which currently outsources that work to the Taiwanese giant TSMC, is actively hiring foundry engineers, apparently to close that gap itself. We first reported on the financial pressure squeezing both companies on 28 July 2026, in our story on the single-day stock selloff that wiped more than 10% off each firm's value.
What happens next?
Samsung won a court injunction in July 2026 blocking two former chip workers from joining SK Hynix for 18 months, citing chips as a national core technology. That ruling will slow, but not stop, the flow.
Both companies announced plans to invest more than $2 trillion combined by 2040, including a semiconductor cluster near Seoul. SK Hynix added 2,152 staff in the first half of 2026 alone. South Korea's industry will still need roughly 54,000 more workers than it can find by 2031, according to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association.
For engineers like Choi, a seven-year Samsung veteran who was once a star performer, the maths is blunt. "There's always more work to do beyond our basic duties," he said. "But there's no point in doing it."
The real story here isn't the bonuses. It's that Samsung's structural problem, a foundry division bleeding cash while its rival prints money on AI memory, is now bleeding people too. Watch whether HBM4 timelines slip.
