What Taiwan can teach South Korea about China’s chip tech theft — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Three South Korean engineers left a semiconductor testing-components company in November 2023 for a Chinese employer offering double their salaries and allegedly took proprietary probe-card designs, leading to overseas product samples by December 2025.
- South Korea’s Intellectual Property Office reported the trio arranged for a local design firm to modify the stolen probe-card technology, which was then used to develop products in China, risking $30 billion in annual overseas business losses for the victim company.
- ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is under investigation by South Korean prosecutors for allegedly using former Samsung Electronics personnel to replicate Samsung’s 18-nanometer DRAM process, with some recruits paid three to five times their prior salaries.
- Taiwan’s Investigation Bureau formed a specialized team in late 2020 and has since conducted multiple operations against Chinese companies using disguised ownership structures and unauthorized offices to illegally recruit Taiwanese tech workers.
- Nanya Technology charged a senior engineer in August 2026 who allegedly hid a camera among snacks to record 32 confidential process files while seeking employment in China, with internal security detecting the breach via wireless signals and access logs.
- South Korea expanded its espionage law on September 13, 2026, to cover technology theft benefiting any foreign country, not just North Korea, but enforcement remains limited by high thresholds for proving foreign direction and espionage classification.
Why it matters: The $30 billion annual revenue at risk for the South Korean firm underscores how individual engineers can transfer critical semiconductor know-how faster than regulations can respond, making recruitment networks a more urgent target than factory transfers or acquisitions—especially as 54.5% of 2025’s detected tech leaks involved China.
Ask SkimNews
