America’s AI chip talent crisis — why The U.S. needs 157,000 more workers

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As AI companies propose slowing down model development on concerns about the technology's rapid and scary advancements, another issue on the hardware side of the industry might be forcing them to decelerate.

Manpower is at the heart of the world's ability to make enough chips to power artificial intelligence, and the U.S. now faces a shortage of up to 157,000 semiconductor workers by 2030, according to a new report from McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation.

"I'm concerned," said Jon Taylor, executive vice president of Samsung's semiconductor division in Austin, Texas, in an interview with CNBC. "We just don't see that there's enough technical people in the pipeline."

Only 3% of U.S. graduates who take engineering roles enter the semiconductor industry each year, according to McKinsey, and 73% of chip employers report significant difficulty in filling engineering roles.

Engineers and skilled technicians are crucial as the U.S. undergoes its fastest chip manufacturing buildout in history, in a race to make enough memory and logic processors to power AI. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Intel are now pumping out advanced logic chips from new fabrication plants, or fabs, in Arizona.

Samsung will be the next chipmaker to manufacture advanced logic in the U.S., when the South Korean company starts production at the first of two new fabs in Taylor, Texas, later this year. It's part of a $35 billion buildout in the state, and Samsung said the two new fabs are expected to create about 3,500 jobs.

"We're hiring engineers, we're hiring technicians, we're hiring people in supply chain," Taylor said. "Everybody wants and needs the same thing, and it's a bit of a race against time right now as everything is starting to come online."

"We're already the largest producer of college graduates for the Intel Corporation globally, and so we're trying to now become that for TSMC," Michael Crow, president of ASU, told CNBC.

Samsung

Staffing U.S. memory fabs

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Alex Bedoya