The high school pipeline to South Korea's chip fortunes

Huge memory-chip profits from the global AI boom have increased interest in semiconductor factory work. But behind the hype are uncertain job prospects, writes Max Kim from Eumseong County, South Korea

- Max Kim

ever, 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% of the market capitalisation of South Korea's benchmark stock index, which has more than doubled in the past year.

KOREA'S ‘HOTTEST SCHOOL’

The frenzy is being driven by the country's dominance in memory chips, a type of semiconductor critical for feeding data to advanced AI systems. South Korea produces over 60% of the world's supply. Over the past year, demand has outpaced production capacity, sending prices soaring as much as tenfold and fuelling a widespread belief that semiconductors are the career path of the future.