About 40,000 Samsung Electronics employees rallied on Thursday to demand a bigger share of the company’s booming profits, warning they could stage an 18-day strike if negotiations fail — a move that could disrupt production of chips crucial to the AI industry.
The South Korean giant said it would continue efforts to reach a swift agreement in ongoing wage talks.
What unions want
Unions say Samsung’s pay offer is insufficient despite the firm’s strong performance: its shares have surged nearly 300% over the past year on booming demand for AI chips. They want the company to lift a cap on bonus pay that is currently set at 50% of annual base salary.
Unions point to an example of a chip division employee earning 76 million won ($51,000) who would receive a 2025 bonus of 38 million won ($26,000), which they say is less than a third of what a similar role at rival SK Hynix would get. SK Hynix scrapped its bonus cap last September.
SK Hynix, Samsung’s direct rival, and Samsung together produce about two-thirds of the world’s memory chips. After ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, SK Hynix overtook Samsung as Nvidia’s main supplier of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.
Strikes threaten AI chip supply
Samsung has rejected calls to remove the bonus cap but says it will provide extra funding so memory-division workers can earn more than competitors this year. If talks collapse, unions plan an 18-day strike beginning May 21. They claim a production halt could cost the company more than 1 trillion won ($700 million) per day.
Samsung warns even a short disruption could damage customer trust and take years to recover from. Chipmakers have benefited from the AI boom, but the Middle East conflict has raised supply-chain concerns, restricting access to materials like helium and pushing up energy costs.
Long known for resisting unions, Samsung experienced its first-ever worker strike in 2024.
This union-led protest took place at the largest single semiconductor manufacturing site globally in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on April 23, 2026. Image: Jung Ui-Chel/Matrix Images/picture alliance
Edited by: Alex Berry