Never, ever fumble the silicon wafers.
On a recent morning at Chungbuk Semiconductor High School, Kang Soo Jin, a 43-year-old teacher, was drilling this cardinal rule of semiconductor manufacturing into three students at her lab.
The shiny, dinner-plate-size discs are the building blocks of computer chips. But because they are fragile and can be damaged by even the tiniest of contaminants, the students have been practicing transferring them safely from one carrier tray to another using an instrument called a “wafer changer.”
“Let’s say you dropped one,” Ms. Kang said, as a student gingerly pulled a lever, prompting the machine to slide a batch of wafers into open slots. “Guess how much that would be.”
The question was rhetorical. A blank wafer costs around $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. Because of the global artificial intelligence boom, everybody 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 a record $173 billion worth of semiconductors. This year, it is on pace to double that. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the country’s two biggest chip makers, now account for more than 40 percent of the market capitalization of South Korea’s benchmark stock index, which has more than doubled in the past year.
The frenzy is being driven by the country’s dominance in memory chips, a type of semiconductor critical for feeding data to advanced A.I. systems. South Korea produces over 60 percent of the world’s supply. Over the past year, demand has outpaced production capacity, sending prices soaring as much as tenfold and fueling a widespread belief that semiconductors are the career path of the future.
The scale of the chip bonanza has obscured growing strains elsewhere in the economy, where traditional manufacturers and construction firms are struggling. In 2026, youth unemployment climbed to its highest level in years.
This is the moment that Chungbuk Semiconductor High School has been waiting for.
It was founded in 2010 as a “meister” high school, modeled on Germany’s skilled-trades system. The campus, about two hours south of Seoul, is the oldest of four such vocational schools in South Korea dedicated exclusively to semiconductor manufacturing.
Admission inquiries have tripled over the past year, Seo Oun-Seok, the principal, said. The campus, which houses dormitories for its 300 students and six mock fabrication facilities, has also attracted a steady stream of visitors eager to study its model. They’ve included other school administrators and even a state broadcaster from China, where the government has started its own push to build a domestic chip industry.
“It feels like we’re the hottest school in South Korea right now,” Mr. Seo said.
And why shouldn’t it be?
He pointed to a poster on a wall of his office displaying the school’s postgraduate employment rate: 96.4 percent.
Six-figure bonuses
For many parents who call Mr. Seo, the focus is on job prospects at Samsung and SK Hynix, the country’s biggest beneficiaries of the semiconductor boom.
Samsung, despite its reputation for smartphones and televisions, now generates most of its profits from chips. Industry analysts project the company to finish the year with an operating profit of around $200 billion, a sevenfold increase from last year. SK Hynix has been on an equally remarkable run.
Landing a job at either company is spoken of almost like winning the lottery because both firms have union agreements that tie bonuses to operating profits. Under the latest agreement with Samsung’s union, employees in 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, which has long been considered the pinnacle of academic achievement in South Korea. Pathways into the companies’ fabrication lines have become no less competitive.
At Chungbuk, Ms. Kang, the teacher, said only students ranked in the top third of their class would be considered by Samsung, while SK Hynix considered only the top quarter.
Beyond grasping the intricacies of chip manufacturing, including chemicals and machinery, top students are expected to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language, earn at least three technical certifications and complete 25 book reports.
Each year, about 20 high-achieving freshmen are recruited directly by Samsung or SK Hynix through scholarship programs that include internships and lead to full-time employment. Everyone else enters an intensely competitive nationwide recruitment process involving exams and interviews.
“Students study for those tests from 9 in the morning to 9 at night, for a month straight,” Ms. Kang said.
In recent months, graduates who successfully navigated that gantlet have returned to campus bearing 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 already, that he made the right choice.
“When I was in middle school, I tried to convince some of my friends to enroll with me,” he said, grinning. They all chose the university route instead. “A lot of them are now regretting that,” he added.
For the teachers, such visits can evoke a complicated mix of admiration, deflation and envy, Mr. Seo, the principal, said.
“To see your students come back after a year of work, talking about bonuses that are far bigger than your entire salary,” he said, “it’s not easy.”
Uncertain job prospects
As part of a nationwide effort to secure South Korea’s future chip-making work force, the government plans to open another semiconductor meister high school in Seoul next year. Another school is also under consideration.
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 largest chip manufacturing hub.
Last year, Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest employer, pledged to hire 60,000 workers over the next five years, though it did not specify how many would join its semiconductor division. Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Hynix, said the company could generate as many as 20,000 jobs annually.
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 simply cannot create a large number of jobs.”
Chip manufacturing accounts for less than 1 percent of South Korea’s total work force. Between 2023 and 2025, when semiconductor exports rose 75 percent, the industry added just 1,000 jobs, according to government data.
Across the broader economy, employment has fallen: Roughly 40,000 jobs have disappeared over the past year as other sectors have struggled.
Further clouding the outlook, Samsung and SK Hynix have both announced plans to develop autonomous semiconductor factories, powered by A.I. and robotics, by 2030.
“Even with these big projects, I expect the overall number of jobs will actually decrease,” Mr. Joo said.
The consequence of rapid growth in a sector that creates relatively few jobs, he added, is that its outsize profits become concentrated among an ever-smaller group of people, widening income inequality and weakening the country’s longer-term growth prospects.
That reality is already becoming apparent to Choi Seung-kuk, a manager at XT, a semiconductor equipment maintenance company.
XT is one of many subcontractors that work inside Samsung facilities, helping to keep machinery free of the microscopic particles that can ruin wafers. Yet little of the industry’s windfall, he said, has trickled down the supply chain.
“It’s actually been harder to hire new workers this year,” Mr. Choi said at a job fair this month. “We get a lot of people who work for a year, then quit.”
The company has benefited modestly as Samsung has ramped up production. But there is constant downward pressure on wages because subcontractors must undercut competing bids every year to win contracts.
Those concerns, he said, may soon become irrelevant.
“Once they bring in machinery with advanced self-cleaning functions, our jobs will no longer exist,” Mr. Choi said. “Who knows what our company will do then?”
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