For Wayne Yang, general manager of emerging chip materials maker IV Technologies, the biggest headache is not finding new business—demand is booming like never before—but where to find enough engineers and technicians to keep pace with the company’s rapid expansion.
“We are currently expanding a new plant in central Taiwan and actively hiring to support the expansion,” Yang told Nikkei Asia. “However, we have found that our clients, peers, and supply chain partners are all hiring aggressively as well.”
“I am open to every channel, and asking my former college classmates to see if any of their younger schoolmates might be interested,” he said. “But one of them told me:
‘Sorry, bro! Basically, any living, breathing engineer has already been recruited by the big names.'”
Yang’s company operates in a niche area—making high-quality chemical mechanical polishing pads for chipmaking and advanced chip packaging—but its hiring problem is hardly unique.
The global artificial intelligence infrastructure boom is supercharging demand for everything from memory chips and printed circuit boards to lasers and assembly services, and chipmakers and suppliers across Asia are embarking on their biggest ever expansions to keep pace. These expansion plans require hundreds if not thousands of workers.
The battle for talent across Taiwan and the rest of Asia, which sits at the center of the AI hardware supply chain, matters globally. A shortage of new engineers, construction workers, sales representatives and other roles could slow the chip industry’s booming expansion, which is needed to feed AI demand.
As a relatively smaller niche company, IV Technologies is up against stiff talent competition from its bigger rivals, including Qnity, formerly part of DuPont, and Japan’s Fujibo and even its clients of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation. But even they and other big global players are struggling to hire, as Luke Lee, vice president of Texas Instruments and president of TI Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and South Asia, told Nikkei Asia.
“The entire industry is facing the same challenge, not only semiconductors, but also other [related] industries are facing the same challenge too, because it is very difficult to hire enough people now,” Lee said. In places like Vietnam, he said, companies are competing for a limited pool of talent, while the challenge is even more acute in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, where the populations are declining.
In Japan, the total fertility rate—the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime—was 1.14 in 2025, while South Korea’s was 0.82. The figure for Taiwan, which has logged a population decline for 32 consecutive months as of August this year, was just 0.69.
“Globally, semiconductor talent shortage challenges are real, especially in advanced packaging and silicon photonics, where AI-driven capacity expansion is increasing competition for emerging skills that traditional hiring pipelines were not built nor are currently sufficient to supply,” Tan Yew Kong, senior vice president and general manager of APAC manufacturing and the Singapore site at GlobalFoundries, told Nikkei Asia.
Early this year, Nikkei Asia calculated that major Asian chip makers had committed to spend more than USD 136 billion in 2026 to build chipmaking and packaging capacity, but several of them have already hiked capital spending plans further due to stronger-than-expected demand.
ASE, the world’s largest chip packaging and testing services provider, is among them, having already raised its capital spending plans twice this year, from USD 7 billion at the start of 2026 to USD 10.5 billion most recently.
Tien Wu, CEO of ASE, described it as the largest expansion in the company’s history. “The entire hardware supply chain is expanding at a record pace that we have never seen before. Everyone is breaking records, and that means our clients are under tremendous pressure to move faster, and they are pushing us to accelerate,” Wu said.
“We have to hire at least 3,000 people for these new expansions this year, and at least another 1,000 people for next year. Hiring talent is of course a challenge almost everywhere,” Wu added.
The talent shortage in Taiwan is quite severe, according to Weber Chung, chief talent sustainability officer at 104 Job Bank, Taiwan’s largest job search and recruitment platform.
The supply-demand ratio for nearly every job category in the semiconductor industry is well above two, meaning there are more than two job openings for every job seeker on average, Chung told Nikkei Asia. “In some categories, such as facility construction, the shortage is even more acute,” he said. “Every job seeker can have as many as 12 job opportunities.”
Ivy Chen, a former flight attendant who plans to join the tech industry, told Nikkei Asia that the job-hunting environment this year is very different from a few years ago when she first tried to switch careers.
“I sent my resumes to many tech companies several years ago when I first wanted to rejoin the workforce, but they sank like a stone. This year, every resume I sent was followed by face-to-face interviews. Most of them asked how soon I can join them despite having no background in tech,” Chen said.
An executive with United Integrated Services, a builder of high-tech facilities, told Nikkei Asia of the employee search challenges the company faces.
“We do find some serious shortage issues in finding young talent,” the executive said. “For some key technicians, such as electroplating technicians, the average age is already more than 50 years old.”
Another chip industry executive said, “I think the job description will be anyone who can move and learn and can come over to apply to jobs.”
The intensified talent war is a headache for the industry, said an executive with a Japanese chip production tool supplier. “A fresh graduate who only has some 1.5 years of work experience with us just got poached by one of our competitors with a 30% higher salary. … And our salary is already considered quite high in the industry,” the executive said.
These days, an equipment engineer with just two years of experience could get an offer as high as NTD 100,000 (USD 3,150) a month excluding bonuses, the chip tool executive said. “Such a salary level is something that used to be at least six to seven years of working experience. … You can see how intense the competition over talent is in Taiwan.”
Hoton Chang, chairman of Grand Process Technology Corporation, a chip packaging equipment supplier to TSMC and Micron Technology, told Nikkei Asia that hiring has become one of the biggest bottlenecks to rapid expansion as the company needs to increase its production capacity by at least 50%.
“I actually have to hire more human resources specialists just to help us recruit more people. We are not only going to schools, but also reaching out to local communities to find workers,” Chang said. “We have had around 200 job openings since earlier this year. We keep adding people, but somehow those hundreds of vacancies are still there, because every department keeps asking for more staff.”
Chang said the company also plans to hire some foreign workers and gradually increase its production schedule from one shift a day to 1.5 shifts and, eventually, two shifts.
“We’re also asking all our employees to reach out to their friends and acquaintances, and we offer referral bonuses if they successfully bring someone on board,” Chang said.
Not everyone is so despairing. Steve Lin, chairman of Auras Technology, a leading thermal solutions provider to Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and Meta, said his company’s workforce has ballooned from some 100 employees in 2023 to 400 due to the rampant demand to build AI data centers.
“Of course we also face challenges in finding enough talent, but I believe if the price is right, we can find anyone,” Lin told Nikkei Asia.
The Taiwanese government, meanwhile, has stepped in to help. Nearly ten semiconductor schools have been set up recently and are working with chip companies to nurture the needed talent.
In the past, tech companies in Taiwan prioritized applicants who had graduated from the island’s top four universities: National Taiwan University, National Tsinghua University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and National Cheng Kung University. The industry has largely dropped this bias and enlarged its pool of prospective hires, and many have partnered with universities or other training institutions to train more engineers.
Despite such efforts, the industry’s appetite for workers remains huge. TSMC alone aims to hire some 8,000 new employees in Taiwan this year and it is also ramping up overseas recruitment for its new plants in the US and elsewhere. Its global workforce has surged from 65,931 employees in early 2022 to 91,353 as of early 2026, up more than 38% in four years.
“TSMC welcomes talent who are highly enthusiastic about semiconductors and with English proficiency. Additionally, we are recruiting production line operators,” a spokesperson told Nikkei Asia, saying candidates for those roles include not just college graduates but also those with senior high school diplomas.
TSMC is co-hosting a job fair this week alongside a wide range of supply chain partners, including facility builders and equipment and materials suppliers, in an effort to attract more talent to the industry. The chipmaker is also sending two senior executives for the first time back to their alma maters to speak directly with students and encourage more young people to pursue careers in chipmaking.
A further challenge is AI. While the technology has yet to replace humans in the chip industry, it is reshaping the skills companies are looking for. AI-related jobs in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry have increased 67% over the past five years, according to a survey by 104 Job Bank, while one in five new positions across a growing range of roles now requires some form of AI capability.
“All of our new employees are required to learn how to use AI, smart manufacturing technologies and data analytics,” Scott Chen, CEO and president of Kinsus Interconnect Technology, a leading Nvidia and AMD substrate supplier, told Nikkei Asia. “Over the past five years, we’ve focused on training our younger employees. From their very first day with the company, they receive training in smart manufacturing, including data analytics and intelligent production.”
Tan Yew Kong, the senior vice president at GlobalFoundries, has also seen a change in hiring in recent years. “Talent needs in semiconductors are evolving faster than traditional hiring pipelines, driven by AI, digitalization and emerging technologies such as advanced packaging and silicon photonics. Beyond technical expertise, companies increasingly need employees with adaptability, learning agility and data literacy to thrive in a more digital, data-driven environment,” he said.
The hiring boom has also given rise to some unexpected trends.
“It’s not only about engineers. We are also seeing strong demand for a wide range of supporting staff, from cooks and firefighters to security guards all being attracted to join chip or tech companies,” 104 Job Bank’s Chung said. “Interestingly, we are also seeing a significant increase in demand for finance and accounting professionals across the chip industry.”
Salaries for finance and accounting managers in the industry have jumped more than 15% annually as of June, according to the a 2026 semiconductor talent report by 104 Job Bank. Factory managers saw their average salaries rise nearly 10% from a year earlier.
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.
