Three people have been detained for allegedly attempting to steal trade secrets from Taiwan's chip giant TSMC. The Financial Times also reports that the Taiwan offices of Japanese company Tokyo Electron were also raided. Although much about the case remains unknown, TaiwanPlus spoke to tech industry analyst Dave Nicholson of the Furturum Group about what the case might mean for IP security in the global semiconductor industry.
00:00So Dave, as you know, three people have been detained for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to chip giant TSMC's technology and possibly violating the National Security Act. I just want to start with getting your reaction to the case.
00:13Shocking, surprising. While at the same time, if anyone had asked, probably you or myself, is something like this likely to happen, we would have said, oh, yeah, of course, of course. I think it'll be really interesting as details emerge.
00:34Neither TSMC nor the prosecutor's office have said publicly which technology was at risk of being stolen here. But if I can ask you to speculate just a little bit, what kind of tech do you think the alleged thieves might have been after?
00:48Well, we would assume that the most valuable technology would be the most likely to target. But then that would be an assumption. The assumption is two nanometer is what folks are going after. And that, you know, we're in the middle of a global, we call it a cold war, but it's it's a war for AI dominance.
01:09TSMC is the holder of the most valuable information on the latest generation technology that's going to support AI. Because when you think about this, there's sort of two vectors that are involved and it'll be interesting to see how they converge.
01:26There's the question of are there state actors involved or not that are looking at this as sort of part of this arms race, the global cold war for AI.
01:39You would think they'd be going after the crown jewels to two nanometer. On the other hand, if it's simply commercial, if it's simply highly organized crime, they can be going after anything that will make them money.
01:52I think that, you know, my bet is, is that I won't make a bet. I think it's easy. It's easy to assume it's two nanometer. But I don't think we know yet.
02:02The Financial Times and others have reported that the Taiwan offices of the Japanese company Tokyo Electron have also been raided. Did that come as a surprise to you?
02:12The natural assumption on a lot of people's part would be, oh, it's got to be China. It's mainland China. Clearly, they're in there. They steal intellectual property all the time. That's all they do. Right? That's the cliche.
02:25Well, guess what? There are a lot of other folks who can profit from this kind of technology. And there are quite a few state actors who see this as strategically important, not necessarily in the military sense, but in an economic sense.
02:40So could we draw a conclusion that maybe there is Japanese government somehow involvement in this? At this point, that's all spy novel speculation. Does the company itself have something to do with this?
02:56You know, I think that's a little bit more reasonable to speculate, but then who knows what they could be the front for? You know, think about a really, really good way to hide your tracks. Well, you don't hide your tracks by having the breadcrumb trail lead directly to your doorstep.
03:15Now, given the national security and economic stakes you're talking about. Do you think that this case is going to lead to a big wave of increased security measures across the industry?
03:27It should. Yeah, I hope so. They're all they're all, you know, this is again, we're all shocked, but no one is surprised.
03:36And and yeah, I would say that if I am the CISO chief information security officer in a company, I'm probably not getting a lot of sleep tonight.
03:48I'm probably going to be up early tomorrow morning. And and it's, you know, it's drill time. It's it's audit time.
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