Huawei Is Rumored To Be Poaching TSMC Engineers, Offering Them Triple Their Current Salaries In An Effort To Jumpstart Its Chipmaking Endeavors
SMIC and Huawei may have successfully developed the 5nm process, but mass producing thousands of wafers using the older DUV machinery is posing a challenge that neither Chinese firm can scale at this point. Likely realizing that extreme measures need to be taken if complete dependency on overseas companies is the primary goal, Huawei is said to be poaching TSMC engineers by offering monetary rewards in the form of triple the compensation that they currently receive.
TSMC engineers receive emails once every three months from Huawei management, asking them to seek employment in a different company
One of the engineers, a 43-year-old Taiwanese woman called Chloe Chen, can easily find several of these job emails in her inbox, where she is asked typical questions such as considering new opportunities and that a certain firm was looking for someone with her experience level. These emails originate from recruitment agencies controlled by Huawei, with French outlet Le Monde reporting that the individual has never answered any of them.
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It is possible that she would be satisfied with her current position, or it is more than likely that joining Huawei would present a significantly greater risk for her future. In short, jumping ship to the former Chinese giant pretty much means that she would never again be hired by another Taiwanese firm again. The Taiwanese Justice Investigation Bureau has investigated multiple cases like this, where companies present themselves as data analysis firms.
In reality, these entities have an ulterior motive; to recruit Taiwanese talent for the development and mass production of cutting-edge semiconductors. The offers presented by Huawei would be difficult to ignore, as the latter tries to poach talent with salaries that are sometimes three times higher than what TSMC is paying its engineers. Since the end goal for these potential
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