Taiwanese people are truly hardworking.

At 76, MediaTek Chairman Tsai Ming-kai still goes to the office every day, studies frontier technology papers, interviews key talent, and maps out the company’s future. MediaTek will enter its 30th year next year, and its next-stage strategy is becoming increasingly clear.

Every morning at 6 a.m., weather permitting, a group of walkers and joggers gradually appears around Tranquility Lake in Hsinchu Science Park. Among them is 76-year-old MediaTek Chairman Tsai Ming-kai. For more than a decade, he has lived a simple life: his feet grounded in daily discipline, while his mind is always calculating MediaTek’s next move.

Tsai keeps a low social profile. Apart from his daily exercise routine, almost all of his energy is focused on the company. It is understood that MediaTek’s most important internal department is located directly one floor below Tsai’s office, allowing him to personally oversee operations.

As early as 10 years ago, when the first Trump administration began targeting China’s technology sector in 2016 and restricted Huawei’s access to the U.S. market, U.S.-China tensions had not yet reached today’s intensity. At that time, TSMC demonstrated remarkable strength: even after losing Huawei, a customer that once accounted for around 20% of its revenue, it quickly made up the gap with its world-leading process technology and manufacturing capacity. For Tsai, whose company was still deeply dependent on the Chinese market, that moment immediately set off alarm bells.

Tsai understood clearly that MediaTek had already become one of the world’s top five IC design companies and could no longer rely on a single market. He saw the geopolitical risk of depending too heavily on China. So even if doing business in the United States was difficult, MediaTek eventually had to make the move. This was the strategic pivot he had no choice but to make after calmly weighing the risks and rewards…