There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent projects were quite serious, which undermined the Chinese government’s confidence in these efforts. A few years ago, there was even a so-called “transparent computing” scam project that was awarded a national-level prize.

Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.

In fact, aside from high-end chips, China already dominates the mid- and low-end chip segments.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms.

So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c

You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.

If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts:

> The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype

Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.

I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.

This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...

Comparing China's public efforts to build a computer chips industry to the US effort to nuke Japan is kinda wild. Outside of the bait part, the piece coming from Japan Times makes it that much spicier.

Instead of the US recently veering into batpoop-insane policy, the US should be focused on promoting a peaceful and equitable world that it would like to live in when it's not top dog.

As an aside, there are some comments about the "Chinese way of thinking" and the "American way of thinking". I generally think these discussions veer off into notions of cultural superiority. That, also in my opinion, is the mark of weak minds. The fact is once something is shown to be possible, it is exponentially easier to duplicate and improve it. America did this with German technology, China did it with American technology and I am sure countries like India are going to quickly get there too (I am not suggesting the Germans didn't learn from others themselves). This sets a firm base for iterative improvements.

To riff off another comment, China's progress wasn't done by God. America will learn and adopt what's valuable and discard what's not. If I have learned anything about Americans (of all backgrounds), they don't shy away from a challenge. For all its faults, I still personally will root for a society based on something like the American constitution.

A country with technical ability and ambition like China was never going to go "Oh only one company in netherlands can do it? Damn I guess we're snookered then".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAwJESmfy10

This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation?

Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.

They really need to pay us all compensation money. And I mean literally EVERY single company that has been responsible for driving the RAM prices up. Free market my ... ...

I see the same thing with China. It's not so much espionage now (although there might be that) but China instead will just hire people with the right knowledge, so former employees of ASML, Nvidia, TSMC, etc.

I've been saying for awhile that China won't tolerate the export ban on ASML's best lithography machines and NVidia's best chips. It's a national security issue. And China is the one country on Earth I have faith can dedicate itself to a long term goal.

And yet I got the same reaction. "The Chinese will never catch up", etc. Reports have been comiung out that Huawei has started developing and using their own 7nm chips.

Weirdly, the US created this problem. By restricting exports of chips to China, Chinese manufacturers had no choice but to develop their own chips. Had China been flooded with NVidia chips, there would be far less market opportunity.

The American economy is essentially a bet on an AI future now. Were it not for like 7 tech companies, we'd be in a technical recession. I also believe that bubble is going to burst. But the economy as a whole pretty much now requires US dominance of an AI future and I think a lot of people are in for a rude shock as China completely disrupts that.

China hasn't caught up yet. There are still many steps in the supply chain and chip design as a whole but making their own chips at sub-7nm is a massive step in that direction.

If - hear me out - this whole LLM AI thing turns out be be overhyped, won't this capability be useful for a lot of other things , from consumer electronics to combat drones.

e.g. Useful in the growing Chinese EV sector. And lessening dependence on chips made in Taiwan seems strategic.

It seems broader than a bet on "AI" specifically. A more strategic move.

From the article, first paragraph:

> cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance.

World has gained so much from modern Chinese industrial revolution. Why suddenly everyone got cold feet? Nobody was stopping Germany or Japan on their way up even though they were literal former enemies with history of brutal warfare. China never done anything even comparable to others.

"China is 20 years behind"

Horribly dishonest. But they all talked in lockstep: lawmakers + "experts".

So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need.

They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.

EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?

China is a redistribute centralist State. It has to be: a narrow coastal region is hyper wealthy and to maintain territorial integrity it requires a strong government to tax there and spend elsewhere. Hence the infrastructure and construction boom. The high debt is a feature of the system, these are State backed enterprises that live on subsidy.

The upshot is this limits complexity. ASML is in NL for a reason. NL is a feature of Western Europe decentralization. Arguably, Europe conquered the world because its internal fragmentation fostered a rapid gain in complexity.

The US has cemented this into its own constitution and political culture. All talks about "Europe innovation" and "China catching up" are moot. Europe became a colony of the US post WWII and the integration needed to foster internal peace capped its capacity to grow complex. The US is now the most complex society on Earth and no other region can cope with that much complexity on that scale. Both Russia and China are held together by trading complexity off centrality.