As AI companies propose slowing down model development on concerns about the technology's rapid and scary advancements, another issue on the hardware side of the industry might be forcing them to decelerate.
Manpower is at the heart of the world's ability to make enough chips to power artificial intelligence, and the U.S. now faces a shortage of up to 157,000 semiconductor workers by 2030, according to a new report from McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation.
"I'm concerned," said Jon Taylor, executive vice president of Samsung's semiconductor division in Austin, Texas, in an interview with CNBC. "We just don't see that there's enough technical people in the pipeline."
Only 3% of U.S. graduates who take engineering roles enter the semiconductor industry each year, according to McKinsey, and 73% of chip employers report significant difficulty in filling engineering roles.
Engineers and skilled technicians are crucial as the U.S. undergoes its fastest chip manufacturing buildout in history, in a race to make enough memory and logic processors to power AI. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Intel are now pumping out advanced logic chips from new fabrication plants, or fabs, in Arizona.
Samsung will be the next chipmaker to manufacture advanced logic in the U.S., when the South Korean company starts production at the first of two new fabs in Taylor, Texas, later this year. It's part of a $35 billion buildout in the state, and Samsung said the two new fabs are expected to create about 3,500 jobs.
"We're hiring engineers, we're hiring technicians, we're hiring people in supply chain," Taylor said. "Everybody wants and needs the same thing, and it's a bit of a race against time right now as everything is starting to come online."
While America is the birthplace of semiconductors and leads the world in chip design, almost all advanced chips have been manufactured in Asia for decades. That's where the talent pipelines are strongest, and it's why Idaho-based Micron has held expedited hiring sprees at technical universities in South Korea, interviewing students and offering them permanent positions at its Asia fabs, all in a day.
It's a potential bright spot for U.S. college students, who have seen a decline in software engineering roles and increased uncertainty in the job market due to AI. Schools like Purdue University and Arizona State University are spending millions of dollars to launch programs that prepare U.S. students for chip roles.
"We're already the largest producer of college graduates for the Intel Corporation globally, and so we're trying to now become that for TSMC," Michael Crow, president of ASU, told CNBC.
Still, U.S chip jobs often pay far less than in countries like South Korea, where chip workers are highly sought after in the marriage market. The roles there often come with grueling 12-hour shifts, but when thousands of workers threatened strikes at Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, bonuses ballooned upwards of $500,000.
Compare that to salaries in the U.S. that typically pay between $127,000 and $187,000, with senior positions in the industry exceeding $238,000, according to the SEMI Foundation.
"As people continue to evolve their skills, they're going to have to pay higher salaries," Crow said. "Particularly as they're scaling and scaling and scaling and the workforce demands are so significant."
Staffing U.S. memory fabs
Workers are in especially high demand at all the major memory makers, which are racing to add capacity during a global shortage that has giants like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices scrambling to secure supply.
The epicenter of the buildout is South Korea, where CNBC got an exclusive first look at the world's largest memory campus that SK Hynix will start to bring online in February.
Although it currently makes all advanced memory in Asia, Micron is building America's first advanced memory fab in Boise, Idaho, set to open next year, with another under construction in Clay, New York.
SK Hynix is also building its first U.S. facility, at Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, Indiana, although the $4 billion fab is for packaging memory chips instead of front-end manufacturing. Still, SK Hynix and Micron will be competing for a small pool of U.S. memory chip workers.
"We can secure a number of high-quality employees within a few years, based on the collaboration with the local community," SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told CNBC during a groundbreaking ceremony in Indiana. "It's really the critical issue."
According to a Reuters report on Wednesday, SK Hynix is in talks with Intel to manufacture its memory chips in the U.S. for the first time. Under one scenario, SK Hynix would lease part of Intel's chipmaking facility in Ohio, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
At a Micron event in July, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pushed SK Hynix and Samsung to build front-end memory fabs in the U.S. Taylor said those decisions at Samsung aren't up to him.
"Whether it's memory or whether it's logic, I still will be pressed to find all the resources to be able to run those factories," Taylor said.
Samsung and SK Hynix both told CNBC they're bringing workers over from South Korea temporarily to kick off their new U.S. fabs. Samsung also sent U.S. employees to its home country for several months to get hands-on training, following a similar move by TSMC when its first Arizona fabs were under construction in 2021.
"If you look at where advanced technology currently resides, it is in Asia," Taylor said. "Our South Korean colleagues are here to help us start up this equipment that we don't have a lot of experience on."
ASML, a European advanced chip equipment maker, recently launched a U.S.-based training center in an effort to help.
Creating the pipeline
Although skilled chip workers are concentrated overseas, bringing over foreign talent on H-1B visas has become a costly and cumbersome process. The long-term plan, the chipmakers told CNBC, is to create the talent pipeline domestically.
Universities in Taiwan and South Korea have graduate schools or departments devoted to semiconductor training. While not widespread yet, hands-on training programs are popping up at some U.S. schools, with big investments from chip companies.
Purdue launched a series of semiconductor degrees in 2022, with some 2,500 students enrolled in chip-related courses each semester. Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center trains students on chip equipment similar to what they could work on at SK Hynix's nearby fab.
"If you want young people specifically prepared in semiconductors, this is the one place you can come right now for people who have actually majored in and achieved a degree in that," Mitch Daniels, Purdue's interim president and former governor of Indiana, told CNBC. "And our job fairs are always overbooked."
ASU, meanwhile, converted an old Motorola fab into the MacroTechnology Works cleanroom, with a new center, thanks to $200 million from chip equipment maker Applied Materials. TSMC also runs a technician program at ASU, guaranteeing an interview upon completion.
TSMC told CNBC it visited about a dozen universities last year, and plans to offer advanced jobs to many of its hundreds of interns, to help fill some 6,000 roles at its first three fabs in Arizona.
Intel launched its apprenticeship program in Arizona in 2024 and committed $50 million in scholarships at more than 80 Ohio institutions near its fab under construction there. Intel also has a broader semiconductor education pathways program introduced in 2025 that starts at the K-12 level.
Samsung is getting ahead of the shortage with a workforce development program that kicked off in 2023, providing millions of dollars in donations to the University of Texas, Texas A&M and the University of Illinois, with new chip engineering programs at each. It also donated $1 million to help launch new technical labs at Taylor High School last year, and hosts more than 100 interns annually.
Federal support also helps. More than 80 community colleges have launched or expanded semiconductor programs since the CHIPS Act passed in 2022, due in part to a $200 million federal fund for building the domestic chip workforce.
"If we don't move more quickly and aggressively than we have before, we will lose," Daniels said. "And we can't afford to have that on our record."
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