An engineer at Samsung, identified only as Lee, clocks out on time now. He used to work late. Lately, he goes straight home to polish his application for SK Hynix, swapping tips with colleagues on how to draft the perfect personal statement. Even his manager is cheering him on. “My team lead tells us all to jump ship to SK Hynix,” Lee told MIT Technology Review. The reason is painfully simple: a $476,000 bonus.
That’s the per-employee payout SK Hynix is set to distribute this year, mostly in cash, after agreeing to share 10% of its operating profits. Flush with record earnings from making the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s AI accelerators, the company is vacuuming up talent from its cross-town rival. Samsung’s foundry division, where Lee works, is a different story. It’s been operating at a loss making logic chips for clients like Tesla and Google, and bonuses there have cratered to roughly $135,000. Lee watched his labor union wrestle Samsung into a deal that ties bonuses to each division’s own performance. His takeaway was bleak: “Even if Samsung does well in the future, I don’t think any of it will trickle down to me.”
The numbers back up his cynicism. A June survey by Samsung’s labor union found that 81.5% of foundry employees want to leave within two years. The union chief said in April that more than 200 members had already defected to SK Hynix over four months. On Blind, the anonymous workplace forum, Samsung engineers openly confess they’re plotting their exit for bigger paychecks. Lee’s entire 30-person team, minus the two leads, applied to a single SK Hynix posting in July. He and an eight-year veteran both got rejected, but they’re hopeful for the next one. This is the hangover from a strategic blunder: Samsung downsized its HBM team in 2019, betting the market would stay niche, just as SK Hynix doubled down. Now SK Hynix leads the global HBM market, and in June it briefly dethroned Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company.
The talent war is only going to get uglier. Both companies plan to pour more than $2 trillion into a semiconductor mega-cluster south of Seoul by 2040. SK Hynix added 2,152 employees in the first half of 2026 alone and aims to double its manufacturing capacity. Samsung says it will hire 60,000 people over the next five years. But the real question isn’t who can fill seats fastest. It’s whether Samsung can stop the bleeding in the division that actually needs to catch up, or if those foundry engineers will keep polishing their resumes while their team leads give them a thumbs-up from the next cubicle.
