Inside AI gold rush: Massive tech layoffs contrast with jaw-dropping Samsung bonuses
As Samsung chip workers secure historic bonuses, a stark workforce divide is emerging between those who build AI hardware and those displaced by its software
On May 27, South Korea's corporate world delivered a striking snapshot of where the AI economy is heading. Samsung Electronics, one of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductors that form the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI), struck a landmark deal with its union, offering chip workers massive bonuses to avert a crippling strike and prevent rival SK Hynix from poaching a disgruntled workforce.
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Samsung agreed to direct 10.5 per cent of its semiconductor division's operating profit toward special bonuses, with some memory division employees set to pocket up to $416,000. The deal scraps previous salary caps on performance-linked bonuses to 50 per cent of a worker’s salary and stretches across a 10-year earnings period.
Global tech industry seeing a split?
The move, while not entirely unprecedented — SK Hynix struck a similar agreement earlier this year — threatens to set a challenging benchmark for other South Korean companies. Questions are also being raised on how profits accrued from AI boom should be distributed — whether the money should be used to support social welfare schemes.
But beyond Seoul's boardrooms, it raises a far larger question for the global tech industry: is the AI boom quietly dividing the world's workforce into two irreconcilable camps — those who build the technology and grow fabulously wealthy, and those whose livelihoods the same technology is steadily consuming? The echoes of 19th-century inequality between the haves and have-nots are being felt relevant once again.
While giants such as SE and SK Hynix, before, gave their employees extraordinary bonuses, hundreds of thousands of workers are being laid off regularly across the industry.
The AI infrastructure boom has changed memory chips, once seen as a cyclical commodity business, into a lucrative global business. Analysts are calling it a semiconductor supercycle.
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Shares of SE jumped more than 15 per cent earlier in May, lifting the giant’s market capitalisation past the $1 trillion mark as investors continued flooding into AI-linked stocks, said a CNBC repor. The company became only the second in Asia to achieve this milestone, after TSMC, having first crossed the threshold on February 26, as per FactSet data.
The story suggests that Samsung does not merely consume AI — it manufactures the hardware that powers it, placing the company in a fundamentally different position from software or services firms riding the same wave.
AI makers gain, AI users lose
Therefore, while Samsung chip workers celebrate their whopping bonus, the broader tech industry remains witness to a different and less happy story. So far in 2026, there have been 344 layoffs at tech companies with 144,355 people impacted (nearly 1,000 people per day). In 2025, in comparison, there were 783 layoffs at tech companies with 245,953 people impacted (674 people daily). The lay-offs are taking place across industries and beyond Silicon Valley.
The divide comes down to where a company sits in the AI supply chain. Giants such as Samsung and SK Hynix make the chips without which no AI model can function. Workers at the centre of this boom argue that since they are active facilitators of the hardware, they deserve a share of the profits — and Samsung has concluded the same. Software and services companies, on the other hand, are using AI precisely to reduce their reliance on human labour, making their workforces leaner and cheaper to run.
Those who make AI ruling matchmaking space
The result is a tale of two workforces: those who build the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush are growing wealthier. According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, Samsung and SK Hynix employees are now even skipping overseas training programmes to stay home and collect their jaw-dropping AI bonuses.
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Even their dating lives have seen a stellar explosion. Matchmaking firms report women are now actively hunting down chip engineers like they are limited-edition sneakers. As one matchmaking company’s CEO put it, the moment those monstrous bonuses became public knowledge, the floodgates of blind-date requests swung wide open.
On the other hand, those whose jobs AI can replicate are facing an increasingly uncertain future. The deepest concern is not just about losing a current job — it is about entire career paths becoming obsolete before younger workers even get a foothold.