Samsung semiconductor workers strike threatens AI chip supply chain

45,000 Samsung Workers Are About to Stress-Test the Entire AI Supply Chain

The AI boom runs on memory chips. And the people who make those chips are about to walk off the job. On May 21, nearly 45,000 Samsung Electronics workers plan to begin an 18-day strike — the largest walkout in semiconductor history. Their target: the fabrication plants that produce the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips without which every Nvidia GPU, every AI data center, and every large language model is functionally dead weight. ...

May 17, 2026 · 5 min · DBBS Tech