AI turned Samsung into a $1 trillion company. Its workers want a bigger slice of the pie

Hong Kong/Seoul —

Samsung Electronics has become one of the leading beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence boom. Surging demand for semiconductors has turned South Korea’s largest corporation into a $1 trillion company this year, propelling Seoul’s stock market to rank as the world’s sixth-largest.

But one segment of the country is unhappy with the result: Samsung workers. Tens of thousands of employees have threatened to strike, in an unprecedented walkout that would disrupt a crucial source of memory chips at a time when the AI industry is desperate for more.

Hours before the strike was scheduled to start Thursday, the workers’ unions announced they had reached a tentative deal with management. While the agreement still requires a vote by union members, it marks an early win for Samsung employees, who had been demanding higher pay in light of the company’s record profits.

The deal averted – for now – what would be the largest strike in the company’s history, involving more than 48,000 employees, or nearly 40% of its Korean workforce, over 18 days. Most of the participating employees work in memory chips, critical components in AI hardware produced by tech giants Nvidia and AMD.

The prospect of a halt in production rattled both the South Korean government and the global tech industry. Samsung’s revenue accounted for more than 12% of South Korea’s GDP last year. The company is also one of the world’s three main memory chip makers at a time of acute shortages driven by the largest data center buildout in history.

“Any disruption to Samsung’s semiconductor production would go far beyond losses for a single corporate group, leaving deep scars across the national economy,” South Korea’s Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said on…

Source