Samsung's foundry engineers are fleeing to SK Hynix as the AI chip bonus gap widens

Samsung's Bonus Gap With SK Hynix Is Eroding Its Last Moat in AI Chips

Samsung's foundry engineers are applying en masse to work at SK Hynix, and the reason is a number: $476,000. That is the bonus SK Hynix is set to pay each employee this year, fueled by record profits from the high-bandwidth memory chips that power Nvidia's AI accelerators. Engineers in Samsung's foundry division are looking at roughly $135,000 1.

This is not a morale story. It is a story about whether Samsung can hold onto the one structural advantage it still has in the race to build next-generation AI memory.

The bonus gap that started a war

The divergence is built into how each company pays. SK Hynix agreed last year to distribute 10% of operating profits to employees, translating to $476,000 per person this year, mostly in cash. Samsung's deal, struck in May after prolonged negotiations with its labor union, commits 10.5% of the semiconductor division's operating profits annually for ten years, mostly in company stock that vests over three years. But Samsung ties each division's bonus to its own bottom line. The memory division, which also profits from HBM chips, is paying around $400,000 per employee. The foundry division, which manufactures logic chips that companies like Tesla and Google design and has been operating at a loss, is paying roughly $135,000 1.

The gap is doing exactly what SK Hynix intended. A manager at SK Hynix told MIT Technology Review that the large performance bonuses were aimed at luring talent from its competitor 1.

A survey by Samsung's labor union in June found that 81.5% of foundry division employees wanted to leave for another company within two years. Nearly half of employees across the semiconductor division as a whole said the same. In April, union chief Choi Seung-ho reported that more than 200 union members had departed for SK Hynix over the previous four months 1.

Samsung has taken the fight to court. In July, the company won an injunction barring two former chip workers from joining SK Hynix for 18 months, on the grounds that semiconductor technology constitutes a national core technology deserving protection. The court cited the need to establish fair market order amid fierce industry competition 1.

Why foundry talent is the whole game

Here is where the bonus gap stops being a labor dispute and becomes a strategic threat.

Samsung is the only memory chipmaker in the world that also operates a foundry business, according to Park Jun-young, a semiconductor expert at the Industrial Anthropology Laboratory, a research institute, who spent a decade at Samsung 1.

That distinction matters enormously for HBM4, the next generation of high-bandwidth memory. Each HBM4 stack requires a logic chip at its base, manufactured with the kind of advanced process that only foundries can run. Samsung produces this layer in-house. SK Hynix has to outsource it to the Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC 1.

If enough foundry engineers defect, Samsung's position weakens. The internal collaboration between its memory and foundry divisions, the thing that makes in-house HBM4 production possible, becomes harder to sustain. Park warned that if Samsung keeps losing foundry engineers, the cross-division collaboration could become difficult, and SK Hynix, now actively hiring foundry engineers, could produce better HBM research as a result 1.

How the roles reversed

SK Hynix's current dominance is partly a product of Samsung's own miscalculation. In 2019, Samsung downsized its HBM team, betting the market would stay niche. SK Hynix doubled down instead. When the AI boom supercharged demand for HBM, which feeds AI accelerators the enormous data volumes they need at ultra-high speed, SK Hynix was positioned to capture the surge. It now leads the global HBM sector while Samsung works to catch up 1.

The financial reversal has been stark enough to reshape the corporate pecking order. Both companies crossed $1 trillion in market value in May. In June, SK Hynix briefly surpassed Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company 1.

The stakes behind the spending

Both companies are pouring capital into expansion. Samsung and SK Hynix have unveiled 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 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 Korea Semiconductor Industry Association projects a shortage of roughly 54,000 workers by 2031 out of an industry need of about 304,000 1.

Samsung's in-house foundry is the last thing separating it from SK Hynix in the technology that underpins every AI accelerator. The bonuses are not the headline. The headline is what those bonuses are buying SK Hynix: the engineering talent to close that gap for good.