In November 2025, Taiwan’s government launched an investigation into Lo Wei-jen, a longtime TSMC executive who left the company last year to work for its chief American rival, Intel. It was the culmination of months of observation: back in July, when Lo left TSMC, the government began to suspect that he had taken closely-guarded information about the company’s manufacturing processes with him.
A week after announcing the investigation, officials raided Lo’s residences in Taiwan, where they took hard drives and computers. At the same time, a Taiwanese court approved the seizure of his stocks and real estate.
The legal probe marked a milestone for Taiwan. For the first time, Taiwanese prosecutors were invoking the country’s National Security Act to explore whether there was leakage of trade secrets, transforming what was once treated as a professionally-damaging civil matter into a severe, criminal investigation.
For Taiwan, the stakes of Lo’s case go beyond the fate of a single executive. Semiconductors themselves cannot defend Taiwan against an invasion from China, but TSMC’s unrivaled ability to manufacture them remains a key factor deterring escalation.
Firms like Huawei or Intel may be destined to close the gap with TSMC eventually. But even just another decade of Taiwan chip dominance would mean more time to invest in the sort of technology that can more directly deter an attack — like drones.
Yet eight months later, Lo is in the United States, where he is an executive vice president at Intel, while the investigation against him in Taiwan has stalled.
“There’s [been] no progress for this case,” said KaiChieh KJ Hsu, a judge in the National Security and Military Division of the Taipei District Court in Taiwan.
The delays in Lo’s case illustrate how easily Taiwan’s effort to protect its chip industry has become entangled with broader geopolitical forces. In past cases, where the companies attempting to steal TSMC’s chip secrets were Chinese, the legal and political logic were aligned: China was threatening Taiwan economically and militarily. To protect against one was to protect against the other.
Lo’s case is different. Intel is one of TSMC’s chief competitors. But Intel has also become the darling of the Trump administration, which acquired a 10% stake in the company last year as part of its effort to revitalize American chip manufacturing. The United States is also Taiwan’s most important military backer, and the last thing Taiwan wants to do is make the Trump administration upset.
“It’s just another case where Taiwan has to very carefully manage its tension with US companies and the US government,” said Ming-yen Ho, a non-resident fellow at Taiwan’s government-funded DSET think tank, who has worked at TSMC.
National Security Law amended: a key turning point
The story of Lo’s case begins with the Taiwanese government’s amendment of the National Security Law in 2022. Before then, cases involving the leakage of corporate secrets were prosecuted under the Trade Secrets Act, which carried relatively milder penalties. That system incentivized some Taiwanese to risk being caught in order to go work in China, where firms were offering extravagant compensation packages for TSMC talent.
“People were sort of like, ‘Oh, maybe I can [make] $1 million and only serve two years,” Hsu said.
In 2022, Taiwan decided that these penalties would need to be much harsher. In an amendment to the National Security Law, the government added punishments of up to 12 years of imprisonment and fines of up to $100 million New Taiwan dollars, or roughly $3 million USD. At the time, the Taiwanese government characterized the new measures as a tool to protect its chip industry against “the Chinese Communist Party’s illegal activities of talent-poaching and secret-stealing.”
So far, however, the investigations that have come to light have focused on former TSMC employees who were believed to be working on behalf of companies from Japan and the United States. Future prosecutions may target Chinese firms, sources have told Resilience Media, but the initial trend reveals a sobering dynamic: in a world increasingly defined by Trumpian transactionalism, Taiwan is steeling itself against threats to its economic resilience from countries that are supposed to be its friends.
In August 2023, former TSMC engineer Chen Li-ming met with his former colleague Wu Ping-chun at TMSC’s corporate headquarters in Hsinchu, a Taiwanese city that is the heart of the global chip business. Wu, who also worked as an engineer, opened a file on his business laptop containing information related to TSMC’s most advanced manufacturing process and allowed Chen to photograph it with his phone.
By that time, Chen was working for Tokyo Electron, a Japanese firm that makes semiconductor production equipment. Chen’s intention, according to a press release accompanying his indictment in August 2025, was to use the information on Wu’s laptop to help Tokyo Electron win contracts to supply equipment for TSMC’s leading edge 2-nanometer manufacturing process.
In May 2024, Chen Wei-chieh, another TSMC employee, borrowed the password of an unsuspecting colleague to access a company database and send pictures of sensitive files to Chen Li-ming. Chen Li-ming carried out a similar scheme at the home of Ko Yi-ping, another TSMC employee, in May 2025. Ko used his laptop to remotely access a file containing corporate secrets and allowed Chen to take pictures.
In April of this year, a court in Taipei sentenced Chen Li-ming, as the ringleader of the operation, to 10 years in prison. Wu got three years, and Ko got two. Chen Wei-chieh, whose actions the authorities said were inconsistent and evasive during the investigation, was sentenced to six years in prison.
In its explanation of the severity of Chen Wei-chieh’s punishment, the court also cited the sensitivity of the information he stole.
“The trade secrets he reproduced without authorization belonged to the confidential information of the 14-angstrom process,” the court said, referring to a form of chip manufacturing one generation beyond the 2-nanometer process. “This is an advanced technology node for TSMC’s semiconductor process to move from the ‘nanometer’ to the ‘angstrom’ era. It is the key to continuing and maintaining its leading position in the world’s most advanced process.”
‘A thousand grains of sand’
The information leaked to Tokyo Electron alone would not be enough to threaten TSMC’s dominance in the semiconductor industry. But lower-level prosecutions are still important, said Hsu, the national security judge.
He explained that the Taiwanese government’s approach to protecting the chip industry is based on the “thousand grains of sand” theory of Chinese espionage. If you wanted to steal a bucket of sand from an island, Hsu said, the KGB would send highly trained operatives in the dead of night to grab the whole bucket. China, by contrast, would send 1,000 people posing as tourists, each of whom would steal a single grain in the light of day.
In the world of TSMC, grains of sand are stages in the highly complex process required to manufacture leading edge chips. Knowledge of these processes is carefully siloed throughout different parts of the company, a deliberate policy aimed at making it more difficult for any single employee to take TSMC’s secrets everywhere.
But if there were a single person capable of gathering enough sand to make a real dent in TSMC’s bucket, then it might be Lo. Last November, just days after Taiwanese officials announced that they were investigating Lo, TSMC filed its own lawsuit against him. TSMC said in a statement that in March 2024, Lo had been transferred from overseeing R&D to working in corporate strategy.
“However, after assuming this position,” the company said, “Lo allegedly continued to convene meetings with staff of the Research & Development departments to provide information for him to understand the advanced technologies currently, and planned to be, under development by TSMC.”
TSMC has been deliberately vague about what they think Lo stole: saying so might constitute a security breach in itself. But Lo’s alleged behavior is reminiscent of the most famous corporate espionage saga in TSMC’s history, when it repeatedly sued Chinese rival SMIC for trade secrets theft in 2003.
During the legal proceedings of that case, it came to light that C.Y. Shi, who had managed TSMC’s internal trade secrets records before defecting to SMIC in September 2001, had photocopied piles of private documents from one of TSMC’s most advanced chip plants the weekend before he left the company. (TSMC later won a massive settlement in a U.S. court.)
Yet Ho, the DSET fellow, said that even if the claims against Lo are true, he doubts that one executive on his own could assemble enough knowledge to transfer TSMC’s manufacturing processes to Intel.
“The real damage is coming from a person bringing an entire team,” Ho said.
He added that, for now, the primary reason Lo’s case has not proceeded is simple: Lo is not in Taiwan. If he never returns from the United States, the Taiwanese government will have little recourse against him. The U.S. government has extradited Taiwanese citizens facing criminal charges in recent memory. But it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration, so eager to see Intel close the gap with TSMC, would grant extradition for Lo.
To Ho, Lo’s case also illustrates something else about Taiwan’s efforts to police trade secret leaks in the semiconductor industry: experienced executives are far better equipped to evade prosecution than ordinary engineers like Chen Li-ming.
“I do think it seems now, in practice, it deters lower-level workers’ ability to move, but not the higher-level [ones],” he said.
