TSMC has turned a quiet executive move into a full-blown legal battle, officially suing its former senior vice president Dr. 
Wei-Jen Lo after he joined Intel, accusing him of carrying some of the company’s most sensitive chipmaking secrets with him. What could have been just another headline about talent changing teams has become a test case for how far chipmakers will go to protect their crown-jewel technologies in an era many already describe as a new tech cold war.
The story began with Lo’s departure from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, where he spent years at the center of its cutting-edge process technology. Internally, he was deeply involved in the development and ramp-up of nodes such as the next-generation 2 nm process and in the complex web of semiconductor operations that make TSMC the world’s leading foundry. On paper, his next chapter was framed as an academic-leaning role in the United States. In reality, it emerged that he was taking a senior position at Intel, a direct rival that is racing to catch up with – and ideally surpass – TSMC in advanced manufacturing and packaging.
For TSMC, that was a red flag big enough to send straight to court. On November 25, 2025, the company filed a lawsuit in Taiwan’s Intellectual Property and Commercial Court against Lo, accusing him of breaching his employment contract, violating a non-compete agreement he signed while at the company, and potentially infringing the country’s Trade Secrets Act. The core allegation is straightforward but explosive: there is, in TSMC’s words, a “high probability” that Lo may use, disclose, or otherwise transfer trade secrets and confidential information to Intel.
Those secrets are not abstract. They include manufacturing know-how around TSMC’s 2 nm node, process recipes, yield-improvement tricks, and lessons learned from serving demanding U.S. customers at scale. This kind of tacit knowledge is extremely hard to document yet invaluable when a rival is building its own advanced fabs, from Arizona to Europe. Even without handing over a single file, an experienced executive can guide roadmaps, flag likely pitfalls, and accelerate problem-solving simply by knowing what worked – and what failed – inside a competitor’s walls.
TSMC also says it was never properly informed that Lo would be joining Intel. According to the company, it was led to believe that his post-TSMC work would be limited to academic activities. Seeing him land in a senior role at Intel Foundry Services, just as IFS pitches itself as a major competitor in advanced packaging with technologies such as EMIB and Foveros, was therefore interpreted as a direct threat. From TSMC’s perspective, legal action – up to and including claims for damages – is not just punitive but preventive.
Intel, for its part, rejects the narrative. The company, through statements attributed to CEO Lip-Bu Tan, has called the accusations from Taiwanese media baseless and insists that Intel respects intellectual property across the industry, including that of competitors like TSMC. The message is clear: yes, Intel will hire top talent, even from rivals, but it claims strict internal rules ensure no trade secrets are imported along with those résumés.
Online, the case has sparked an even sharper debate. Some commentators frame it, somewhat crudely, as “an American company stealing Chinese tech again,” casually lumping Taiwanese innovation into the broader geopolitical contest between Washington and Beijing. Others argue that in practice everyone in the industry borrows ideas from everyone else, and when technology transfer – legal or not – hits a wall, the conflict simply shifts to tariffs, sanctions, currency battles, and, in the worst cases, actual wars over resources such as oil and critical materials.
That sense of escalation is exactly why many observers now liken advanced process know-how to plutonium: dangerous, tightly controlled, and central to national power. TSMC’s ability to manufacture chips at 3 nm and below underpins not just phone and PC markets but also AI accelerators, military systems, and financial infrastructure worldwide. Any hint that those capabilities could be replicated or leap-frogged by a rival – whether in the U.S., China, or elsewhere – immediately becomes a matter of strategic concern, not just corporate competition.
At the same time, the lawsuit throws a harsh spotlight on the non-compete contracts that senior technologists increasingly face. From one angle, they look reasonable: when a company invests billions of dollars in a node like 2 nm, it wants assurances that the people who built it won’t simply walk next door and hand over the playbook. From another angle, critics argue that such clauses can effectively imprison experts inside one employer, preventing them from using skills and experience that are part of their own career, not a document locked in a safe.
The optics of this case do not help. To some, Intel publicly dismissing the concerns as groundless while reportedly assigning Lo to responsibilities closely aligned with his TSMC role looks contradictory, even if technically legal. It fuels the perception that non-competes are only as strong as a company’s willingness to enforce them – and the courts’ willingness to back them – once a star executive decides to cross the aisle.
Beyond the courtroom drama, there is a more practical question for the industry: will TSMC’s suit actually deter similar moves in the future? If the court sides with the foundry giant and imposes serious penalties, other senior managers may think twice before jumping to a direct rival, especially in jurisdictions where trade secret laws are strict. If, however, the case fizzles out or ends in a quiet settlement, the lesson might instead be that aggressive legal posturing is just another cost of doing business in the high-stakes chip race.
For now, no one can say with certainty whether TSMC will suffer a concrete disadvantage from Lo’s move to Intel. What is clear is that a single executive transfer has crystallized much bigger anxieties: about the fragility of semiconductor supply chains, about how far governments will go to keep key technologies at home, and about whether the global foundry market is drifting from open competition toward a more polarized, bloc-driven landscape.
Regardless of how the judges rule, the Lo lawsuit will be remembered as more than a personal dispute between an employer and a departing executive. It is a snapshot of an industry where secrecy is currency, process nodes are strategic weapons, and every high-profile hire can be interpreted as a move on the board of a sprawling, slow-motion technological cold war.