On June 18, local time in the United States, Nvidia's stock price rose, with a total market value of $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft and Apple to become the world's most valuable company. Nvidia has undoubtedly emerged as the big winner in this AI race.
Not only that, as technology giants compete to seize the AI market, especially in the field of AI semiconductors, the battle for talent is also intensifying, and Nvidia is also a leader in this talent war.
According to LinkedIn data as of June 19, 515 Nvidia employees have worked at Samsung Electronics, which is almost double the number of former Nvidia employees currently working at Samsung (278). This means that Samsung's brain drain to Nvidia is more significant. This talent flow has even caused great concern among industry insiders in South Korea.
According to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, fewer than 5,000 people in the semiconductor industry in South Korea graduate from university or graduate school each year. If this trend continues, the industry will face a talent shortage of 54,000 people by 2031. This talent gap is becoming increasingly acute as companies such as Nvidia, Micron and TSMC attract key talent from South Korean semiconductor giants such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, especially Nvidia, which is leading the "artificial intelligence (AI) boom."
With its advantages in the field of AI chips, Nvidia has attracted talents from not only Samsung, but also other giants.
Although SK hynix is a major supplier of NVIDIA's high-bandwidth memory (HBM), it is still not relenting in the war for talent. According to LinkedIn data, 38 of Nvidia's employees have worked for SK hynix, but none have switched to SK hynix. In addition, Nvidia has recruited 159 employees from Micron, another HBM supplier, compared with 38 former Nvidia employees who joined Micron.
In addition, TSMC, one of NVIDIA's closest partners, is also a source of talent for NVIDIA, and as many as 89 former employees have joined NVIDIA, while only 12 former employees of Nvidia have gone to TSMC.
In this war for talent, Nvidia and Intel are even more fierce, Nvidia has recruited as many as 2,848 employees from Intel, while only 544 former Nvidia employees have joined Intel.
Source: Park Sang-hoon
The global semiconductor industry is fiercely competitive, with Nvidia, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Micron and TSMC all vying for technological supremacy, and talent has become the key.
For example, on May 13 this year, Intel hired an industry veteran, Kevin O'Buckley, as its senior vice president and general manager of the foundry chip manufacturing business, in an attempt to challenge Samsung Electronics and TSMC to regain leadership in the foundry field.
Note: O'Barckley has more than 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, including 17 years in technology development and manufacturing at IBM before moving to GF as vice president of product development. Most recently, he served as senior vice president of hardware engineering for Marvell's Custom, Compute and Storage Group.
On May 21, Samsung Electronics also suddenly announced that it had replaced the head of the semiconductor DS (device solutions) division, and transferred Chun Young-hyun (전영현), the head of the future business planning department (vice chairman), to the head of the DS department of the semiconductor business. According to the market's interpretation, this move is to cope with the fierce competition in the artificial intelligence high-end chip market.
Among them, Samsung Electronics has lagged behind SK hynix in the field of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor cores. For example, the fifth-generation high-bandwidth memory HBM3E, including Micron and SK hynix, has been verified by NVIDIA at the beginning of this year and has received orders, and SK hynix has also begun mass production of the fifth-generation HBM3E for NVIDIA, while Samsung Electronics has not yet passed NVIDIA's verification.
In April this year, the United States also scrapped the "non-compete agreement", which also gave American high-tech talent the freedom to change jobs and technology companies to recruit talent, but also intensified the competition for talent. Just earlier this month, there was an extremely dramatic scene in the US chip industry. Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor, a major manufacturer of FPGA chips, abruptly left and immediately joined rival II-VI Coherent as CEO.
With the continuous development of the industry, the competition will only become more and more fierce, who can cultivate and attract more outstanding talents, who can occupy an advantage in the competition.