A hot potato: Huawei has been dealing with the consequences of US sanctions for years now. To try and stay competitive, the Chinese giant has been poaching employees from other companies, with those within the Taiwanese semiconductor industry being a particularly enticing target. Huawei is certainly making offers that are hard to refuse, including salaries said to be up to three times higher than those at TSMC.
With its 61.7% share of the global semiconductor foundry market, TSMC is the world's most valuable semiconductor company and the largest independent semiconductor foundry. It got to this position thanks to its advanced manufacturing capabilities.
It's not surprising, then, that Huawei is desperate to poach some of TSMC's top engineers. The Chinese company has been sanctioned by the US, having been placed on the Entity List in 2019, restricting its access to US technology and components without a special license. It is also limited in its ability to acquire semiconductors made with US technology, even from foreign manufacturers such as TSMC.
According to French publication Le Monde, Huawei has been trying to hire TSMC engineers every few months, a way of not only securing these employees' vast experience, but also in the hope of acquiring some of TSMC's trade secrets. As noted by Tom's Hardware, TSMC enforces strict project compartmentalization, thereby ensuring no single employee has wide access to its sensitive information. Therefore, Huawei and SMIC – China's leading chipmaker, which is also on the Entity List – have been casting their recruitment nets wide over TSMC in the hope of learning all they can about its confidential tech.
Taiwan's Justice Investigation Bureau is cracking down on this practice, which sometimes involves Chinese companies posing as data analytics firms and offering up to three times the local rates as salaries. Taiwan sees this as a way of firms stealing semiconductor development trade secrets from the island for the benefit of China.
A lot of TSMC workers turn down these offers. They may be lucrative, but they come with a potential risk to their careers: it's hard to get another job after switching sides to a sanctioned Chinese firm. "I never respond," said one engineer, 43-year-old Chloe Chen, who added that she would risk never being hired by American or Taiwanese semiconductor firms again if she went to the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Last month, semiconductor research firm Tech Insights conducted a teardown of Huawei's Ascend 910B AI processor and identified core circuitry produced by TSMC within the chip. TSMC suspects that its technology may have reached Huawei through intermediaries such as Chinese companies Sophgo and Bitmain. In response, TSMC has halted shipments to certain clients and canceled suspicious orders.
Huawei keeps trying to poach TSMC engineers by offering to triple their salaries
