TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Memory maker Micron appointed former TSMC Chair Mark Liu (劉德音) as part of its board of directors, the company announced Wednesday.

In a press release, Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said Liu is a leader with strong technical expertise, per CNA. “He has decades of experience leading one of the world’s most advanced and sophisticated semiconductor companies, with fab operations at the largest scale," it said. 

Mehrotra said Liu’s decades of experience will help Micron scale its business and seize AI-driven opportunities across data centers and edge computing.

Industry experts said while TSMC’s CoWoS high-bandwidth memory (HBM) collaboration with South Korea’s Hynix remains strong, Micron has recently made inroads into TSMC’s supply chain, per Liberty Times. Liu’s appointment may help strengthen ties between the two companies.

However, other market sources argue that since HBM is procured by customers and merely stacked in TSMC’s CoWoS process, Nvidia’s primary supplier remains Hynix. Close collaboration between TSMC and Hynix is essential to ensure optimal performance for AI chipsets combining GPUs and HBM.

Furthermore, board positions are often more symbolic than functional, and whether Liu’s role at Micron will impact its relationship with TSMC remains to be seen, they said.

Liu joined TSMC in 1993 as engineering deputy director, where he established the company’s first 8-inch wafer fab and later led the development of its first 12-inch fab. After TSMC founder Morris Chang (張忠謀) retired in June 2018, Liu took over as chair, a position he held until his retirement in June last year.