High School lays foundation for S Korea’s chipmaking fortunes

Max Kim

EUMSEONG, SOUTH KOREA: Never, ever fumble the silicon wafers.

On a recent morning at Chungbuk Semiconductor High School, Kang Soo Jin, 43, a 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,”

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 chipmakers, 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.

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. 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 Semiconductor manufacturing is a capital-intensive business, not a labour-intensive one. It simply cannot create a large number of jobs – Joo Won, economist, Hyundai Research Institute

“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,” 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%. For many parents who call 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.

The New York Times