A Taiwanese court handed down its harshest ruling yet in a semiconductor trade secret case on Monday, sentencing a former TSMC engineer to 10 years in prison and fining Japanese equipment giant Tokyo Electron (TEL) NT$150 million (approximately US$4.6 million) for stealing advanced chipmaking secrets — marking the first time a corporation has been penalized under Taiwan’s National Security Act.

Global cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to expand their procurement of AI servers from Taiwan, while high-end GPUs and TPUs manufactured by TSMC are in short supply. Analysts say AI will become as ubiquitous as electricity and the Internet, extending beyond cloud computing into appliances, automobiles, and robotics.

As global companies race to capture opportunities in AI optical communications and co-packaged optics (CPO), Taiwanese LED and optoelectronics firms are actively transforming and entering the field. Everlight Electronics, a leading LED packaging company, has also begun low-profile positioning, considering investments in related startups and leveraging its strengths in high-end optocouplers to play a key role in optical signal transmission and coupling.