China’s AI and chip firms are handing out shares to keep their engineers

Chinese chip companies are running unusually broad equity schemes to keep engineers, with Cambricon covering 85.3% of its workforce and AMEC more than 97%. Europe’s semiconductor sector has a talent gap estimated at 65,000 workers.

Chinese chip companies are giving away equity at a scale that looks less like a bonus scheme and more like a defensive measure. Cambricon has unlocked around 600,000 shares for 124 core staff, worth an average of 5.57mn yuan each, or about $828,000.

The breadth is the more striking number. The same company has granted 5mn shares to 944 employees, which is 85.3% of its workforce, in a plan running to 2028.

It is not alone in that approach. Zhongji InnoLight, which makes optical transceivers for AI data centres, allocated 2.48mn shares to 99 key personnel with average yields above 26mn yuan, and the chip equipment maker AMEC has a restricted stock plan covering more than 97% of its staff.

Cash is moving in the same direction. ByteDance and Tencent have reportedly offered pay increases of up to 150% and bonuses of around 35% to secure AI talent.

The pressure behind it is domestic as much as geopolitical. Chinese firms are poaching from one another while export controls have made domestic chip design a national priority, which concentrates demand on a small pool of engineers.

The awards are not unconditional. Cambricon has tied an incentive plan to a revenue target of roughly $14.8bn, which turns retention into a performance instrument rather than a gift.

Europe’s problem is described in the opposite terms. The European Chips Skills Academy has put the continent’s semiconductor talent gap at 65,000 workers, in a region that has more AI talent than the United States by headcount.

What Europe lacks is the instrument rather than the people. Many of its relevant employers are listed incumbents, research institutes or university spinouts, and employee share schemes differ so much between member states that equity is a harder tool to reach for.

Its answer has largely been training. Skills academies, apprenticeships and Chips Act programmes address supply, on a timescale measured in graduate cohorts rather than quarters.

The American answer is simply money. TNW has reported that Anthropic pays the highest salaries in AI research, to the point that its chief executive has worried aloud about people joining for the pay.

So three regions are answering the same shortage differently. China is offering ownership, America is offering cash, and Europe is offering courses, which is the only one of the three that cannot be accepted immediately.