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Lee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, clocks out when his shift ends. He used to work longer hours, going the extra mile to excel at his projects. But lately, he’s been coming straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix, sharing tips with his coworkers on how to draft a stellar personal statement. Even his boss encourages him to make the move.

“My team lead tells us all to jump ship to SK Hynix,” says Lee. He and his coworkers are feeling demoralized by the $476,000 bonus that SK Hynix is set to pay its employees, flush with record profits from making the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s AI accelerators. The figure dwarfs what chip workers at Samsung are set to receive and is sparking an exodus.

As the AI boom heats up, the semiconductor titans are waging a fierce talent war with flashy bonuses, aggressive recruiting, and even a courtroom injunction. Who wins could tilt the race to dominate the next generation of the HBM chips at the heart of the AI boom.

“Except for our two team leads, my entire team [of 30 people] just applied to SK Hynix,” Lee says, referring to a job posting the company published in July. Lee, who has worked at Samsung for three years, even applied for an entry-level position at its rival. A coworker, who has worked at Samsung for eight years, applied for the same one. They both got rejected. But they’re hopeful that they’ll get a callback for a posting seeking a more experienced engineer.

All employees at Samsung and SK Hynix that MIT Technology Review spoke with asked to be identified by just their last name or a pseudonym because they feared retaliation from their employer. Samsung declined to comment, and SK Hynix did not respond to requests for comment.

After prolonged negotiations with its labor union, Samsung struck a deal in May to pay out 10.5% of the semiconductor division’s operating profits to employees as bonuses annually for 10 years, mostly in company stock that vests over three years. The move came after SK Hynix agreed last year to pay out 10% of operating profits to employees, which translates to $476,000 per employee this year—mostly in cash.  

But at Samsung, each division’s bonus is tied to its own bottom line. Chip workers in its memory division, which is also reaping a windfall from making HBM chips, are getting paid a bonus of roughly $400,000 per employee this year. But those who, like Lee, work in Samsung’s foundry division, which manufactures logic chips that companies like Tesla and Google design and has been operating at a loss, are getting a bonus of roughly $135,000. 

Employees told MIT Technology Review that Samsung said it can’t give as many bonuses to divisions that aren’t performing well. Lee, after watching the labor union wrestle with the company for months, says he has felt disappointed by what he ended up with: “Even if Samsung does well in the future, I don’t think any of it will trickle down to me.” 

The workers’ lagging bonuses are making SK Hynix suddenly look appealing. According to a survey by the Samsung labor union in June, 81.5% of employees in the company’s foundry division, and nearly half of employees in the semiconductor division as a whole, said they wanted to go to another company in the next two years. In April, Samsung labor union chief Choi Seung-ho said more than 200 members of the union had left for SK Hynix over the past four months. On Blind, an anonymous workplace forum, a chorus of disgruntled engineers at Samsung confess that they want to defect to SK Hynix for the bigger bonuses. 

For decades, SK Hynix lived in Samsung’s shadow. It was the smaller, scrappier memory maker that elite engineering students at universities looked past when applying for jobs. But in 2019, Samsung downsized its HBM team, betting the market would stay niche, while SK Hynix doubled down on the technology. Then the AI boom supercharged the demand for HBMs, which feed AI chips the enormous amounts of data they need at ultra-high speed, driving prices to unprecedented levels. SK Hynix now leads the global market for HBMs, while Samsung is playing catch-up. Both companies topped $1 trillion in market value in May, and SK Hynix briefly dethroned Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company in June.

Predicting that demand for memory chips will continue to surge, the semiconductor titans are making aggressive investments to expand their business. Last month, the companies unveiled plans to invest more than $2 trillion by 2040, including a semiconductor “mega-cluster” in Yongin, a city south of Seoul. To staff the expansion, SK Hynix added 2,152 employees in the first half of 2026 alone and aims to double its manufacturing capacity in five years. Samsung plans to hire 60,000 employees over the next five years, especially for its semiconductor division. Even so, the pipeline will fall short: South Korea’s semiconductor industry will need about 304,000 workers by 2031 and faces a shortage of roughly 54,000, according to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association.

Now the longtime rivals are showering workers with big bonuses to keep—and poach—talent. “[SK Hynix] seems to target Samsung engineers when hiring because it’s a rival,” says Baek, a manager at SK Hynix. “From what I heard internally, the big performance bonuses we got were aimed at luring away talent from our competitor.”

Courts are starting to weigh in. In July, Samsung won an injunction barring two former chip workers from working at SK Hynix for 18 months, on the grounds that chips are a national core technology deserving protection. “With competition in the semiconductor industry fierce, it’s necessary to establish a fair market order,” the court ruled.

The talent exodus threatens a crucial advantage that Samsung still holds in the HBM race. “Samsung is the only memory maker in the world that owns a foundry business,” says Park Jun-young, a semiconductor expert at the Industrial Anthropology Laboratory, a research institute, who worked at Samsung for a decade. 

With the latest generation of the technology, known as HBM4, the logic chip at the base of each memory stack must be manufactured with the kind of advanced process that only foundries run. Samsung can do this in-house, while SK Hynix outsources it to the Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC. “If Samsung keeps losing engineers in the foundry … the collaboration between memory division and foundry division could become difficult,” says Park. “SK Hynix, which used to have only a memory team and is now hiring foundry engineers, could do better research on HBMs.”

Choi, an engineer who has worked at Samsung for seven years, says he was once a star on his team, getting glowing performance reviews from his managers. But lately, he and his coworkers have been busy applying for every SK Hynix job posting they see. “We tell each other when the next SK Hynix job posting is up,” he says. “There’s always more work to do beyond our basic duties. But there’s no point in doing it.”