Samsung’s chip workers are jumping ship to rival SK Hynix

Lee still shows up to his job at Samsung's chip division every day. He just doesn't stay late anymore. Instead he goes home and works on his SK Hynix application, trading personal-statement tips with coworkers who are doing the exact same thing. Even his team lead is telling people to leave. That's not a rogue manager venting — it's basically the mood across Samsung's semiconductor business right now.

The number driving all this is $476,000. That's the bonus SK Hynix employees are getting this year, on the back of record profits from high-bandwidth memory chips that feed Nvidia's AI accelerators. Samsung's foundry workers, by contrast, are looking at roughly $135,000, because Samsung ties bonuses to each division's own performance and the foundry business has been losing money. Even Samsung's memory workers, who make comparable HBM chips, are getting around $400,000 — still short of Hynix's payout. A Samsung labor union survey found 81.5% of foundry employees and nearly half of all semiconductor staff want out within two years. More than 200 union members reportedly left for SK Hynix in just four months earlier this year.

The irony is thick. SK Hynix spent decades as Samsung's less-glamorous little sibling, the memory maker top graduates overlooked. Then in 2019 Samsung shrank its HBM team, betting the tech would stay a niche product, while SK Hynix kept investing. The AI boom proved Samsung wrong in spectacular fashion, and SK Hynix now leads the global HBM market outright, briefly overtaking Samsung as Korea's most valuable company this June. Both firms are now worth over $1 trillion and plan to pour more than $2 trillion combined into new capacity by 2040 — expansion plans that require exactly the engineers who are currently fleeing.

What's actually at stake is Samsung's structural advantage: it's the only memory maker that also owns its own advanced foundry, letting it manufacture the tricky logic base chips that HBM4 requires in-house, while SK Hynix has to outsource that step to TSMC. If Samsung keeps bleeding foundry engineers, researchers like Park Jun-young argue the tight collaboration between its memory and foundry teams could break down — just as SK Hynix starts hiring its own foundry talent and closing that gap. Samsung has already gone to court, winning an injunction blocking two former engineers from joining SK Hynix for 18 months on national-security grounds, a sign of how seriously it's taking the leak.

Meanwhile the daily reality inside Samsung sounds less like a battle for AI supremacy and more like quiet resignation. Choi, a seven-year veteran once praised in performance reviews, says he and his team now spend their spare time tracking new SK Hynix job postings instead of doing extra work for a company that, in his words, gives him no reason to bother anymore.