Photographed, printed and sent to China: The "spy" of the chip giant sent to prison

A court in Seoul upheld an 18-month prison sentence imposed on a former employee of the South Korean chip giant SK Hynix, reported the Yonhap news agency today (Sunday). The employee was convicted of leaking classified information about semiconductor manufacturing technology to a Chinese company in 2022.

According to the report, the court rejected the defendant's appeal and confirmed the lower court's ruling. The leaked classified information concerned CMOS-type image sensors — a technology used in non-memory chips for smartphone and laptop cameras.

From the court's ruling, it appears that the employee, who previously worked at the company's branch in China, violated internal security procedures when he printed and photographed documents containing trade secrets that he downloaded from the internal server of SK Hynix. Later, the defendant disclosed part of the information in a resume he submitted to the Chinese company, whose name was not mentioned in the report.

The employee admitted to all the charges attributed to him, and the report noted that the company managed to recover and return to its possession most of the information that was taken.

Meteoric rise

The industrial espionage case is taking place at the height of a period of unprecedented prosperity for SK Hynix. The company, which has become one of the key players in the artificial intelligence (AI) gold rush, recently completed its giant IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

As part of the offering, SK Hynix raised an incredible sum of 26.5 billion dollars — the largest debut ever on the US stock market by a foreign company, while surpassing the historical record of the Chinese trading giant Alibaba from 2014. The deal pushed the company's total market value beyond the 1.19 trillion dollar mark.

The meteoric rise of SK Hynix relies mainly on a 14-year-old strategic bet on the development of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) — a technology that enables the fast data transfer rates required for AI accelerators. Today, the company holds a global market share of about 56.4% in the HBM sector, and it serves as the primary supplier for the chip giant Nvidia.

In its latest financial reports, the company reported a jump in revenue to 35 billion dollars and a historical net profit of 26.48 billion dollars, with the proceeds from the offering intended for the expansion of its advanced production facilities in South Korea.