The United States, which has led global semiconductor design, is delaying factory investment schedules worth hundreds of trillions of won because it cannot find enough people to actually make the chips.
On the 7th, according to an analysis involving McKinsey, the SEMI industry association, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. semiconductor industry is estimated to be short up to 157,000 skilled workers by 2030. About three-quarters of semiconductor corporations that responded to the survey said they are having difficulty hiring engineers. The United States earns more than half of global semiconductor revenue by leveraging Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm, but its ability to mass-produce those chips at domestic plants has largely disappeared over the past 30 years.
McKinsey tallied that 104,300 engineers are needed to manage semiconductor processes and equipment, but the number of new workers that can be supplied is only 16,300, leaving a gap of about 88,000. It also saw that 72,400 technicians are needed to operate and inspect equipment on the production floor, but the available supply is stuck at 8,900. McKinsey projected that in 2030, about 74% of unfilled jobs in the semiconductor industry will be in manufacturing and 60% will be in engineering.
To make matters worse, a series of large new plants that have absorbed astronomical funding are now waiting to come online. TSMC has decided to invest up to $265 billion (about 401 trillion won) in Arizona, including 12 semiconductor and packaging facilities. Micron plans to spend up to $100 billion (about 151 trillion won) to build a memory manufacturing facility in New York. Samsung Electronics is building a logic semiconductor plant in Texas. Intel's $28 billion (about 42 trillion won) plant under construction in Ohio is also expected to run into labor shortages once production ramps up. McKinsey projected that labor shortages in the semiconductor industry will be particularly severe in regions where new plants are clustered, such as Texas, California, Arizona, New York, and Ohio. Building new plants is considered a key project in President Donald Trump's economic policy. But Bloomberg said, "Rising prices of copper, steel, and cement are adding to construction costs."
Behind the severe labor shortage in the U.S. semiconductor industry lies a restructuring of the industrial landscape that has unfolded over decades. U.S. corporations have focused over the past 30 years on profitable design and software instead of production, which requires massive capital expenditure and carries business cycle risks. Nvidia and AMD have grown under a "fabless (semiconductor corporations without factories)" model, outsourcing chip manufacturing to Taiwan's TSMC. It is a choice that reduces capital burden for individual corporations and boosts margins. As a result, as major U.S. semiconductor corporations all took similar paths, the overall domestic production base shrank. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the U.S. share of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity plunged by 27 percentage points from 37% in 1990 to 10% in 2022.
On top of that, young people's aversion to STEM manufacturing in the United States has exacerbated hiring difficulties. According to Bloomberg, only about 3% of U.S. engineering graduates go into the semiconductor industry. Most graduates choose artificial intelligence (AI) and software corporations, which pay more and offer flexible work styles, over semiconductor manufacturing that requires plant work. Taylor Roundtree, a McKinsey partner who took part in the analysis, said, "Semiconductors have not seen large-scale expansion in the United States for decades," and "for high school counselors or college professors, semiconductor manufacturing is not a career that naturally comes to mind to recommend to students."
The U.S. government and industry, under intense pressure, have rushed to craft countermeasures, but the situation remains tough. The CHIPS Act, enacted in 2022, allocates federal funds to train semiconductor talent. Under this law, the U.S. government is investing $200 million (about 300 billion won) in the NSF through 2027 to run student education and new worker training programs. Experts said the program has somewhat increased the supply of production technicians but has done little to alleviate the shortage of manufacturing and hardware engineers. In Arizona, where TSMC facilities will be located, a hands-on program has even emerged for elementary school students to handle semiconductor equipment and try on cleanroom suits. Citing experts, Bloomberg said, "If the labor shortage is left unaddressed, it could undermine not only the investments corporations have planned but also the impact of federal subsidies under the CHIPS Act." The industry proposed that the government continue funding while expanding semiconductor curricula so that students are exposed to the industry early.
Even if workers are recruited with difficulty, many hurdles remain before chips can be mass-produced properly. To mass-produce semiconductors, it is not enough to have just people, buildings, and equipment. Manufacturing engineers who tune process conditions to reduce defect rates and technicians who repair equipment, along with suppliers of high-purity gases, chemicals, wafers, and photomasks, plus ultrapure water and waste-treatment facilities, need to cluster around the plant. In Hsinchu, Taiwan, and in Hwaseong, Pyeongtaek, and Icheon in Korea, such partner ecosystems have taken shape over decades. But new manufacturing plants in the United States must rebuild supplier networks from scratch.
Experts said that while blueprints and advanced equipment can be assembled with investment, on-the-ground experience and manufacturing know-how to stabilize Production yield (the ratio of chips per wafer that function properly) are hard to accumulate in a short time. They also noted that it takes years more for new graduates to grow into skilled workers who can take charge of real processes. Roundtree told Bloomberg, "Across the semiconductor market, there is simply a shortage of talent for the industry to share," and "the potential gap is so large that the industry ultimately has to solve it together."