Seoul National University will train 110 specialists in AI semiconductor technology over the next six years, according to a report from The Elec.

The program targets one of the tightest constraints in Korea's semiconductor sector: the supply of engineers who can design and develop chips for artificial intelligence workloads. While Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have committed tens of trillions of won to fab construction and advanced packaging capacity for AI memory, the domestic pipeline of qualified AI-chip engineers has not kept pace with that investment.

Seoul National University, the country's top-ranked engineering institution, will select and develop the 110 trainees across the six-year horizon. The initiative positions the university as a direct supplier of specialized talent to Korea's two memory giants and to the broader fabless ecosystem that the government has been trying to cultivate around AI accelerators and edge inference silicon.

The scale is modest relative to industry demand. Samsung's semiconductor divisions alone employ tens of thousands of engineers, and both Samsung and SK hynix have expanded hiring of PhD-level designers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and logic-process development as AI accelerator demand surged. A cohort of 110 experts, however, signals where the industry expects the next bottleneck to sit: not in wafer capacity, but in the human capital needed to architect AI-specific silicon.

For Korea, the program fits a pattern of state-and-academia intervention aimed at narrowing the design-talent gap with the United States and Taiwan, whose universities feed far larger logic-design and foundry workforces. The Elec's report did not specify funding amounts, corporate partners, or the curriculum structure of the program.

If the initiative succeeds, its graduates will enter a market where HBM supply contracts for 2025 and beyond are already largely committed, and where competition for AI-chip design staff has pushed compensation packages sharply upward across Korea, Taiwan and the US.