2025 semiconductor sales are projected to reach record highs, driven largely by AI and hyperscale data center expansion.
This voracious appetite for AI infrastructure now faces an additional obstacle with ever-changing trade policies, throwing the supply of critical components into disarray, mostly sourced from Asia and other foreign countries. While headlines focus on materials like lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and chip manufacturing, a parallel crisis is accelerating: the talent crunch.
Companies aren’t just racing to secure cutting-edge GPUs and semiconductors. They’re also scrambling to find engineers, data scientists, and machine learning specialists who can help transform their organizations and clients for a new AI-powered business environment.
The AI boom has turned talent into a strategic supply chain issue as critical as rare earth minerals or chips. And much like the race to restructure international trade operations, companies are rethinking how and where to build their AI teams.
AI Talent Shortage
CompTIA’s Tech Jobs 2025 Report reported nearly 478,000 active tech job postings in the U.S, with AI-related roles increasing to be approximately 21% of that demand, or around 100,000 openings specifically seeking AI skills.
This trend is only accelerating, as non-tech industries have collectively surpassed tech firms in hiring tech talent—a clear signal that AI demand is fueling hiring tech workers in non-tech sectors.
Much like chip supply chains, tech companies have historically relied on global sourcing, especially through offshore centers. But shifting geopolitics and the push for real-time collaboration changed the old offshore playbook. Businesses today run on technologies that extend to every part of the organization. Enterprise software needs to be always on. The new priority? Proximity, stability, and speed.
Enter the Micro Capability Center
Before the AI Trend, companies were already opening small, agile R&D hubs—typically with fewer than 100 people—located in cost-efficient locations. These centers, powered by local providers, are built to test digital initiatives or new markets while scaling efficiently by leveraging the provider’s economies of scale.
Global research firm ISG calls them Micro Capability Centers. This approach enables “critical elements of innovation: agility, scalability, cost-efficiency, and versatility. Conversely, if an innovation falls short of expectations, the business can rapidly pivot to another idea or dissolve the operation and minimize losses.”
This model is especially effective for SMBs, but also highly attractive to large enterprises that need agility as they can’t afford to lose months or millions waiting for a traditional offshore operation to ramp up.
The Perfect Storm
The cost of opening a foreign center has dropped dramatically. “If a company wanted to operate its own offshore captive 15-20 years ago, it required 1,000 – 2,000 people. The economics are now down at 30 – 40 people”, one Forbes analyst notes.
While most B2B software companies and System Integrators have added nearshore operations, companies in other industries and all sizes are rushing to evaluate and implement similar capabilities. The combination of AI-driven urgency and global operations thinking is accelerating this shift.
The role of Mexico
For North America, Mexico has long been the de facto nearshore location. And for AI-driven centers, it continues to check all the boxes.
- Proximity: Major cities like Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City are in the same time zones as U.S. tech hubs—enabling real-time collaboration and similar flight times as from other U.S. cities.
- Talent Depth: Each of these metro areas mentioned above has a larger GDP and Population than some entire Latin American countries, like Costa Rica, Panama or Uruguay. Mexico houses over 1,250 higher education institutions, producing 120,000 STEM graduates a year, including top-tier talent from schools like Tec de Monterrey, ranking leader for Business and Engineering in Latin America.
- Trade Advantages: Thanks to the USMCA trade agreement, Mexico has the foundation for preferred conditions, predictable IP protections, and lower compliance friction compared to distant offshore markets. This made Mexico the top trading partner of the USA for the past years, above China and Canada.
- Geopolitical Alignment: Let’s not forget that Mexico is the only nearshore country the North America. In fact, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will host the 2026 FIFA World Cup together.
The Soft Landing Advantage
Still, launching a foreign operation comes with real complexity: HR, payroll, compliance, legal structures, procurement, international banking, and cultural alignment. That’s why Soft Landing providers are emerging as strategic partners in the AI age.
They provide a turnkey setup to build and run a nearshore operation, integrating end-to-end services needed to run locally. From local recruiting and team assembly, payroll, compliance, facilities management, legal advisory, and local market data. This compresses time-to-market from 5+ months to just weeks, reduces risk, and allows U.S. firms to retain full control of operations.
The shelter model, used for decades by manufacturers entering Mexico, has evolved into the as-a-Service framework. Foreign companies opening new operations are using this pay-per-use approach. Similar to how start-ups no longer spend time and money on building a new data center from scratch, but use AWS-type options.
In Conclusion
For years, the global supply chain focused on physical components. But in the AI era, the borderless flow of knowledge has become vital.
Companies that treat Talent as a strategic resource and who rethink how and where they build teams will be better positioned to compete. Mexico offers the ideal launchpad, and Micro Capability Centers, enabled by soft landing solutions, are quickly becoming the smartest way to expand. Private Investors are favoring this phased approach as well.
Starting this year, non-tech companies have already been prioritizing getting their data clean, organized, to have the proper foundation for AI initiatives. And on top of that, reports of the 2025 first quarter just saw how AI drove VCs to record investments in Enterprise Saas.
