A limited pool of young chip engineering talent is being drawn on while global competition for engineers remains fierce among chip companies in South Korea, Taiwan, and China.
The 2025 workforce story was AI displacement becoming real. Companies that had spent 2024 'restructuring around AI' began the second round — cutting roles that AI tools had genuinely automated. Customer support, content moderation, and QA teams bore the heaviest cuts. The language shifted from 'efficiency' to 'transformation.'