[Teheran-ro] When Silicon Valley Calls, Should They Be Sent to Saemangeum Instead?

"It felt like being dragged off to the Aoji coal mine."
This was in the late 2010s, when SK hynix’s High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) development was running into serious trouble. The team worked around the clock, but failures kept piling up and the investment looked like pouring water into a bottomless jar. For team leaders, it was a graveyard for careers. That is why the HBM team was nicknamed the "Aoji coal mine."
Even so, they say they "gritted their teeth and endured." Samsung Electronics’ HBM development team, which staked everything on a complete redesign of its architecture and managed to live up to its name in just a year and a half, must have gone through an equally brutal period. These are the people behind Korea’s record exports and the Kospi’s surge toward the 5,800 mark.
"Come to Saemangeum." This was the refrain last month, when politicians and local civic groups pushed an improvised idea to relocate the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster. Leaving aside the industrial flaws of a stand-alone move with no upstream or downstream linkages, there was a very practical question: "Will top-tier talent really move down to Saemangeum right now?"
For the political class, that question was of little interest.
At the very same time, offers were pouring in that made Korea’s semiconductor engineers sit up and take notice. Nvidia said it would hire Korean semiconductor talent, dangling salaries approaching 400 million won a year plus stock compensation. Broadcom and Micron Technology likewise put multi-hundred-million-won packages on the table for Korean semiconductor experts.
Last week, Tesla Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk even posted the Korean flag on his social media account and beckoned Korean artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor talent to "come to Tesla." On anonymous online communities for office workers, posts keep appearing from people who have successfully moved to Silicon Valley companies such as Amazon, Meta, and Google. Some say, "I’m making around 400 million won before tax," while others describe it as "less about the money, more about a chance to boost my future market value by several levels." According to a study on talent outflow conducted by Chaired Professor Jinwoo Shin at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, differences in pay, research environment, and growth potential are the main drivers behind overseas moves. A newly minted PhD in Korea might earn just over 100 million won a year, while at Big Tech companies they receive 400,000 to 500,000 dollars, roughly 550 million to 700 million won. It is encouraging that SK hynix recently raised its compensation level by paying performance bonuses worth 2,964% of this year’s base salary. Even so, voices are growing louder that the entire advanced industrial sector needs to rethink its compensation systems, talent acquisition strategies, and organizational culture. Another worrying sign is that this year, the rate of students giving up their admission to the semiconductor contract departments at Yonsei University and Korea University (KU) reached 47.6% and 76.2%, respectively. This raises a different but equally serious set of questions. It is time for the nation and its companies to give semiconductor and AI talent real confidence in their future. Silicon Valley’s courtship of Korea’s semiconductor engineers is heating up.
ehcho@fnnews.com Cho Eun-hyo Reporter