Catenaa, Wednesday, May 27, 2026- TSMC CEO C.C. Wei told staff they’ll see more than a 30% bump in their profit-sharing payouts this year on average.
TSMC, considered a linchpin of global AI infrastructure, will expand its employee incentive program as profits surge.
At a town hall on Wednesday, Wei said he’s confident that Taiwan-based employees on average will see more than a 30% year-over-year increase in their profit-sharing bonus, better than the prior year’s increase, Bloomberg News reported.
Wei’s comments underscore how the prime beneficiaries of a historic boom in AI development and spending are coming under increasing pressure to share more of their rapidly expanding income.
This week, Samsung Electronics’s main union scored an agreement for the world’s biggest memory chipmaker to dole out some $27 billion in bonuses to workers after labor leaders threatened to organize a strike.
The TSMC CEO’s pledge followed days of online discourse about the company’s quarterly bonuses, with some anonymous posts questioning the size of the increases.
The company said in a statement earlier this week that it’s highly confident that the full-year growth rate of its staff profit sharing, based on performance evaluation, will surpass that of last year.
Over more than a decade as leader at TSMC, Wei has emphasized stability and long-term thinking in his remarks about company strategy.
During the pandemic, he has repeatedly said TSMC’s pricing would be strategic rather than opportunistic, and his approach has proven successful as the company has managed to elevate its gross margin to an enviable 66% this year.
Hsinchu-based TSMC reported $18.2 billion in earnings from the March quarter, more than double what it brought in over the same period two years earlier.
TSMC’s overall employee profit-sharing pool grew roughly in line with its bottom line last year. The company allocated about $3.2 billion for the program in 2025, up 46.6% from the year before.
The chipmaker in its articles of incorporation has pledged to set aside no less than 1% of its annual profit for its incentive program.
The timing of the TSMC town hall coincided with a tentative end to a month-long confrontation between South Korea’s chip titan Samsung and its largest worker union.
Unlike Korea’s most valuable company, TSMC does not have an organized labor union, but its employees have started to express their frustrations publicly in online forums.
Samsung and its union agreed to a deal this week that will deliver bonuses of roughly $340,000 for each person in its chipmaking group.
