Simon Chang

Early life and education Chang was born on 24 June 1954 in Taipei, Taiwan. His father was from Tianjin, China, and, after graduating from university, moved to Taiwan in 1948, where he worked for the Chinese Petroleum Corporation at its Kaohsiung refinery. His mother, a native of Tainan, also worked for the company, where his parents met before marrying and moving to Taipei. As a child, Chang developed an interest in engineering through his father, a civil engineer.

Chang attended Taipei Municipal Datong Junior High School, graduating in 1969. He then graduated from Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo High School in 1972. After high school, he graduated from National Taiwan University with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in civil engineering in 1976. As an undergraduate, he completed an internship on the construction of the North-link line in Hualien County and helped to survey bridge piers near Xincheng.

Chang completed graduate studies in the United States, earning a Master of Science (M.S.) in civil engineering and structural engineering from Stanford University in 1977 and his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Cornell University in 1981 with a specialization in computer graphics. Academic career After completing his doctorate, Chang returned to Taiwan and joined the civil engineering faculty of National Taiwan University (NTU), where he taught successively as a lecturer, associate professor, and full professor until 1990. At NTU, Chang introduced some of the country's first courses in computer graphics and computer-aided design. He was promoted to a full professorship in 1983.

While at NTU, Chang became involved in plans by the National Science Council (NSC) to establish a national supercomputing facility; he and NTU computer science professor Lin Yi-peng were assigned to prepare the proposal for what became the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC). He became the center's first director and headed it from 1991 through 1997. His responsibilities during the center's establishment extended from construction of its facilities to the procurement of its supercomputer equipment. He then was the director of the NSC's Department of Planning and Evaluation from 1998 to 2000. In that position, he wrote the first government white paper on science and technology (S&T). In August 2000, Acer recruited Chang to help develop its data-center business, and he became general manager of the newly-established Acer subsidiary An-Hsin Information Services (安碁資訊), which was created to provide internet data-center and information-technology services. The company initially offered services including website and application hosting, corporate information-technology outsourcing, data storage and backup, and streaming-media infrastructure. Chang also served from 2000 to 2010 as the vice president of Acer's e-Enabling Services Business Group, whose operations included data-center and information-security services.

In 2010, Chang was recruited by Google and became the company's regional director of hardware operations in Asia, a position he held until 2012. In September 2011, Google announced that it would invest more than US$100 million in a new data center in Changhua County, one of three data centers then being planned by the company in East Asia; Chang was one of the officials responsible for Google's Asian data-center expansion. Chang also helped the company to establish the a facility in Changhua, the company's first data center in Taiwan. Chang later joined the presidential campaign of Kuomintang candidate Han Kuo-yu as an adviser without halting his own campaign. In August 2019, Han formed a national policy advisory group headed by Chang. Chang's selection as the Kuomintang's 2020 Taiwan presidential election vice presidential candidate was announced on 11 November 2019.

Taoyuan mayoralty (2022–) In May 2022, Chang was nominated by the Kuomintang as its candidate in the local elections for the Taoyuan mayoralty after a closed-door meeting of the party's Central Standing Committee. Chang was elected by 52.02% percentage of votes and assumed office in December 2022.