Former Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) president Charles Kau (高啟全) has reportedly quit his job at China’s Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd (清華紫光) after his five-year contract expired.
Kau joined Tsinghua Unigroup in 2015 after retiring from Nanya Technology, the biggest DRAM chipmaker in Taiwan.
He was the first top executive from a Taiwanese memorychip maker to join a Chinese firm financially backed by Beijing, and had raised concern that he would help China catch up with Taiwan in building its memorychip industry.
Photo: CNA
Last year, Tsinghua Unigroup appointed Kau as chief executive officer of its newly formed unit, Yangtze Memory Technology Corp (長江存儲), aiming to develop and produce China’s first 3D NAND flash memory chips.
Yangtze Memory last month announced that its latest 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips have been adopted by customers for their solid-state-drive (SSD) products, according to a statement posted on its Web site.
Kau confirmed that he did not renew his contract with Tsinghua Unigroup when it expired, Central News Agency reported yesterday.
The report quoted Kau as saying that he had completed his mission at the firm and had decided to pursue his own career, declining to reveal his next move.
Kau could not be reached by the Taipei Times for comment as of press time yesterday.
Kau helped found Nanya Technology in 1995. Prior to joining Nanya, he worked at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), Intel Corp, Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc and Macronix International Co (旺宏電子).
In June, he was tapped by Wiwynn Corp (緯穎科技) to serve as an independent board director at the company, a subsidiary of Wistron Corp (緯創).
Wiwynn supplies cloud-based servers and solutions to global data center operators, such as Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat