Key points
- Over two chip openings per job seeker in Taiwan
- ASE to hire at least 3,000 people this year
- Texas Instruments (TXN) says the squeeze is industry-wide
- Taiwan's fertility rate fell to 0.69 in 2025
Taiwan's chip industry has more than two open jobs for every person looking for one, and ASE, the world's largest chip packaging and testing company, needs to hire at least 3,000 people this year. A chip materials maker in central Taiwan has been calling old university classmates to fill a single new plant.
Executives at Texas Instruments (TXN), GlobalFoundries (GFS), and ASE all described the same shortage, Nikkei Asia reported from Taipei on September 16.
Wayne Yang, general manager of IV Technologies, is the one working the phones. "I am open to every channel, and asking my former college classmates to see if any of their younger schoolmates might be interested," he said. "But one of them told me, 'Sorry, bro! Basically, any living, breathing engineer has already been recruited by the big names.'"
Yang's company, IV Technologies, makes chemical mechanical polishing pads, a niche product used in chipmaking and advanced packaging, and is expanding in central Taiwan. Finding staff for that expansion has proved difficult, Yang said, because his clients, competitors, and supply chain partners are all hiring hard at the same time.
What the shortage looks like on the ground
On 104 Job Bank, Taiwan's largest recruitment platform, the supply-demand ratio for nearly every semiconductor job category now sits above 2, meaning more than two openings for each job seeker. Weber Chung, the platform's chief talent sustainability officer, said the gap is wider in some categories. In facility construction he put it at as many as 12 opportunities for a single job seeker.
That has changed who gets called back. Ivy Chen, a former flight attendant moving into the industry, said her earlier attempt to switch careers went nowhere. "I sent my resumes to many tech companies several years ago when I first wanted to rejoin the workforce, but they sank like a stone," she said. This year every resume drew a face-to-face interview, and most of those employers asked how soon she could start despite her having no technical background.
Pay has moved with it. An executive at a Japanese chip tool supplier said a graduate 18 months into the job was poached by a competitor for 30% more, from a base the executive described as already high for the industry. The same executive said an equipment engineer with two years of experience can now be offered 100,000 New Taiwan dollars a month, about $3,150 before bonuses, a level that used to require six or seven years.
The buildout needs thousands of people it does not have
ASE raised its 2026 capital spending twice this year, from $7 billion to $10.5 billion, which chief executive Tien Wu called the largest expansion in the company's history. Wu said the company has to hire at least 3,000 people for those expansions this year and at least 1,000 more next year.
Hoton Chang, chairman of Grand Process Technology, which supplies packaging equipment to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) and Micron Technology (MU), needs to lift production capacity by at least 50% and can't fill the roles to do it.
"We have had around 200 job openings since earlier this year. We keep adding people, but somehow those hundreds of vacancies are still there, because every department keeps asking for more staff," Chang said. He has taken on extra recruiters, started approaching local communities rather than only schools, added referral bonuses, and plans to move from one shift a day toward two.
Nikkei Asia calculated earlier this year that major Asian chipmakers had committed more than $136 billion in 2026 to chipmaking and packaging capacity, and reported that several have raised those plans since on stronger demand.
Why this one does not resolve quickly
Luke Lee, vice president of Texas Instruments and president of its Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and South Asia business, said the difficulty runs past semiconductors into related industries. He said companies in Vietnam are competing over a limited pool, and that the squeeze is sharper in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, where populations are shrinking.
Low birth rates add to the longer-term workforce pressure. Japan's total fertility rate was 1.14 in 2025 and South Korea's was 0.82. Taiwan's fell to 0.69, and the island has recorded a population decline for 32 consecutive months as of August.
The gap isn't evenly spread across skills. Tan Yew Kong, senior vice president and general manager of APAC manufacturing and the Singapore site at GlobalFoundries, said the strain is worst in advanced packaging and silicon photonics, where AI-driven expansion is bidding for skills that existing hiring pipelines were never built to supply.
Some of the response is already visible. Taiwan has set up nearly 10 semiconductor schools that work with chip companies, and employers have largely dropped a long-standing preference for graduates of the island's top four universities. South Korea is seeing the pipeline respond from the student side, where applications to company-sponsored university programs hit a record 8,994 this year, up 18.2%, while applications to the top medical schools fell 11.3%.
Those students graduate in several years. The capacity is being built now.
Not everyone frames it as a wall. Steve Lin, chairman of Auras Technology, which supplies thermal systems to Nvidia (NVDA), Amazon Web Services, and Meta, has grown his workforce from about 100 in 2023 to 400. "Of course we also face challenges in finding enough talent, but I believe if the price is right, we can find anyone," Lin said.
