High School Pipeline to South Korea’s Chip-Making Fortunes

ByTech Word News

Never, ever mess with silicon wafers.

On a recent morning at Chungbuk Semiconductor High School, Kang Soo Jin, a 43-year-old teacher, practiced this fundamental rule of semiconductor manufacturing with three students in her lab.

The shiny plates-sized discs are the building blocks of computer chips. But because they are fragile and can be damaged by even the slightest dirt, the students practiced transferring them safely from one carrier to another using a tool called a “wafer changer.”

“Let’s say you dropped one,” Ms. Kang said as the student carefully pulled the lever and caused the machine to insert a batch of wafers into the open slots. “Guess how much that would be.”

The question was rhetorical. An empty slice costs about $180, she explained. By the time it has been etched with electronic circuits, it can be worth thousands. The students nodded.

Not that they needed to be told. Thanks to the global boom in artificial intelligence, everyone in South Korea now understands the value of semiconductors, which have become the country’s most valuable commodity — and a source of seemingly endless wealth.

In 2025, South Korea exported semiconductors worth a record $173 billion. It is on pace to double this year. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the country’s two biggest chipmakers, now account for more than 40 percent of the market capitalization of South Korea’s benchmark stock index, which has more than doubled over the past year.

The frenzy is driven by the country’s dominance of memory chips, a type of semiconductor critical for feeding data into advanced artificial intelligence systems. South Korea produces over 60 percent of the world’s supply. Over the past year, demand has outstripped production capacity, driving prices up tenfold and fueling widespread belief that semiconductors are the career path of the future.

The scale of the chip bonanza has masked growing tensions elsewhere in the economy, where traditional manufacturers and construction firms are struggling. In 2026, youth unemployment reached its highest level in recent years.

This is the moment Chungbuk Semiconductor High School has been waiting for.

It was founded in 2010 as a “meister” high school modeled after the German craft production system. The campus, about two hours south of Seoul, is the oldest of four such vocational schools in South Korea devoted exclusively to semiconductor manufacturing.

Admission inquiries have tripled in the past year, director Seo Oun-Seok said. The campus, which houses dormitories for 300 students and six mock manufacturing facilities, has also attracted a steady stream of visitors eager to study its model. They included other school administrators and even a state broadcaster from China, where the government has launched its own push to build a domestic chip industry.

“I feel like we are the hottest school in South Korea right now,” Mr. Seo said.

And why shouldn’t it be?

He pointed to a poster on his office wall showing the school’s post-graduation employment rate: 96.4 percent.

Many of the parents who call Mr. Seo are focused on job prospects at Samsung and SK Hynix, the biggest beneficiaries of the country’s semiconductor boom.

Samsung, despite its reputation for smartphones and TVs, now generates most of its profits from chips. Industry analysts expect the company to end the year with an operating profit of around $200 billion, a sevenfold increase over last year. SK Hynix has been on an equally remarkable run.

Getting a job at both companies is almost like winning the lottery, as both companies have union contracts that tie bonuses to operating profits. Under Samsung’s latest union agreement, employees at its semiconductor unit, including assembly line operators, could receive up to $400,000 next year if certain profit targets are met.

Students are increasingly flocking to university engineering programs affiliated with Samsung or SK Hynix rather than medical school, long considered the pinnacle of academic achievement in South Korea. Routes to the production lines of companies have become no less competitive.

Ms Kang, a teacher in Chungbuk, said Samsung would only consider students ranked in the top third of their class, while SK Hynix only considered the top quarter.

In addition to understanding the intricacies of chip manufacturing, including chemicals and machinery, top students are expected to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language, obtain at least three technical certificates and complete 25 book reports.

Each year, approximately 20 successful freshmen are recruited directly by Samsung or SK Hynix through scholarship programs that include internships and lead to full-time employment. All others enter a highly competitive nationwide recruitment process involving tests and interviews.

“Students study for these tests from 9 in the morning to 9 at night, for a whole month,” Ms. Kang said.

In recent months, graduates who have successfully navigated the gauntlet have returned to campus with stories of six-figure bonuses and casually picking up the bill for group meals. Their visits reassure students like No Jun-sik, a 17-year-old senior with a job offer from Samsung, that he made the right decision.

“When I was in high school, I tried to convince some of my friends to sign up for me,” he said with a smile. They all chose the university route instead. “Many of them now regret it,” he added.

For teachers, such visits can evoke a complex mixture of admiration, deflation and envy, said Director Seo.

“Seeing your students come back after a year of work and talk about bonuses that are much bigger than your entire salary,” he said, “isn’t easy.”

As part of a nationwide effort to secure South Korea’s future chip-making workforce, the government plans to open another semiconductor master high school in Seoul next year. Another school is also being considered.

Samsung and SK Hynix are building or planning new semiconductor plants in Yongin, a city south of Seoul where the government has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to create what it hopes will become the world’s biggest chip-making hub.

Last year, Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest employer, pledged to hire 60,000 workers over the next five years, although it did not specify how many would join its semiconductor division. Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Hynix, said the company could create up to 20,000 jobs a year.

Some experts are skeptical.

“Semiconductor manufacturing is a capital-intensive business, not a labor-intensive one,” said Joo Won, an economist at the Hyundai Research Institute. “It just can’t create a lot of jobs.”

Chip manufacturing accounts for less than 1 percent of South Korea’s total workforce. Between 2023 and 2025, when semiconductor exports grew by 75 percent, the industry created just 1,000 jobs, according to government data.

Across the economy, employment has fallen: around 40,000 jobs have disappeared over the past year as other sectors have struggled.

Further clouding the outlook, Samsung and SK Hynix have announced plans to develop autonomous semiconductor factories powered by artificial intelligence and robotics by 2030.

“Even with these big projects, I expect the overall number of jobs to actually decrease,” Mr. Joo said.

The consequence of rapid growth in an industry that creates relatively few jobs, he says, is that its huge profits are concentrated among an ever-smaller group of people, deepening income inequality and weakening the country’s long-term growth prospects.

This reality is already apparent to Choi Seung-kuk, manager of semiconductor equipment maintenance company XT.

XT is one of many subcontractors that work inside Samsung’s facilities to help keep the machinery free of microscopic particles that can destroy wafers. Yet little of the industry’s windfall has trickled down the supply chain, he said.

“It’s actually been harder to hire new workers this year,” Mr. Choi said at a job fair this month. “We have a lot of people who work for a year and then quit.

The company benefited modestly as Samsung ramped up production. However, there is constant downward pressure on wages as subcontractors must undercut competitive bids each year to win contracts.

Those concerns, he says, may soon become irrelevant.

“Once they bring in machines with advanced self-cleaning features, our jobs will no longer exist,” Mr. Choi said. “Who knows what our society will do next?”