Tesla offers up to 5x TSMC salaries to poach engineers for chip plant

Tesla Recruiting TSMC Engineers With Salaries Up to 5x for Terafab Chip Plant

Tesla is offering salaries three to five times higher than those at TSMC to lure experienced semiconductor engineers for its ambitious Terafab chip manufacturing project, according to a report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News published on June 21. The recruitment drive targets senior process engineers at TSMC, with average annual compensation starting at approximately 1.62 million yuan, or around $240,000, plus restricted stock units.sina

A Global Talent Hunt

The aggressive hiring campaign, which began taking shape in March when Tesla first posted Terafab engineering roles in Taiwan, has intensified in recent weeks. Tesla’s job listings seek engineers with more than 10 years of experience in advanced foundry processes including Gate-All-Around transistor technology, FinFET, and backside power delivery networks — capabilities central to sub-3-nanometer chip manufacturing.chosun

Tesla has posted at least nine engineering positions in Taiwan covering lithography, etching, thin-film deposition, chemical mechanical polishing, yield engineering, and process integration. Additional roles have been listed in Palo Alto and Austin, Texas, with base salaries ranging from $88,000 to $338,280 depending on the position.futunn

Rising Tensions Over Talent

The recruitment push comes at a sensitive time for TSMC, which is already grappling with talent retention concerns. In late 2025, the company’s former senior vice president Lo Wei-jen retired and subsequently joined Intel, triggering a national security investigation in Taiwan over allegations that he took confidential documents related to 2nm and next-generation process technologies. TSMC filed a lawsuit alleging Lo breached his employment contract and non-compete clause.rti

TSMC has responded to the broader talent pressure by raising salaries up to 9% for 2026 and planning to hire 8,000 new employees, offering master’s-level engineers starting pay of about $70,000. CEO C.C. Wei has publicly expressed confidence that compensation increases would help retain staff, telling employees he is “not worried” about poaching attempts.sedaily

The Terafab Vision

Terafab, jointly backed by Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX, is a vertically integrated semiconductor facility planned for Tesla’s Austin campus with an investment of $20 to $25 billion. The project aims to manufacture chips equivalent to one terawatt of computing power annually for humanoid robots and data centers, with production targeted to begin by 2029. Elon Musk has said that existing foundries, including TSMC, cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ growing demand for AI compute.futunn