I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash. Now I don't think I'd buy a non-Chinese new car or cellphone, lol.

The only thing to stop them is the will of more powerful states.

If you take Iran as an example, they would have possessed Nuclear weapons long ago if it wasn't for USA/Israel as Iran as a state will throw everything at it.

p.s. And that's a very detailed and well laid out visual article above usual broadsheet standards.

So far they have announced road maps and benchmarks for their upcoming products using this. A new Kirin-series phone/laptop chip and an Ascend AI accelerator - stated performance comparable to leading US products made with EUVL.

Products are due in August.

US sanctioning GPUs to China, then blocking access to latest SOTA models will impact everyone in the world negatively.

We need competition, Europe is not an option anymore, hopefully Chinese labs will keep open sourcing SOTA models

Based on the trend, if China wins, everyone benefits, if US wins, only Americans will benefit and everyone else will suffer

China’s willpower and centralized deployment of that willpower is legendary.

The US is ran by a moronic kleptocracy of conmen and number-go-up techbros that give precisely zero shits about human rights and improving life for the average citizen.

There is no way to defend the moral or political superiority of the west anymore. And who needs to worry about foreign intervention destabilizing internal affairs when we let the extremists, the populists do that for us?

At least if China pulls this off we might get some semi-affordable RAM and SSDs.

the qn is if it will be what china wants and needs

more likely something better or more suited to the ecosystem in china will emerge

I do however wonder how long China can afford to pay the price for this. China is effectively heavily subsidising it's export and research efforts to catch up. But subsidizing with what? They don't have a magic money tree.

To flesh it out a bit more: people in the West complain that the Chinese are unfairly competing, by selling their stuff - cars, batteries, chips etc - at an unfairly low price, either via subsidies or an artificially low exchange rate (or both). There's also IP theft, sure, but there's plenty of home grown IP too.

So this means that when German workers build a car, they get paid a lot more than the Chinese workers. The Chinese AI researchers get paid less than the Americans - for the same work. Sure, it's a mix of patriotic fervor, different purchasing power of the salary (agricultural goods are cheaper in China because farmers get paid less for the same work), etc etc. Subsidies are the same thing scaled up - Chinese government collects taxes, i.e. makes Chinese people work more for the same ultimate outcome.

But this extra economic heft is not coming from nowhere. China is channeling funds that it could spend elsewhere, but instead spends on high IP industries.

Europe and US could do the same. But at a cost! They could tax people more, who would have less money to spend (making them unhappy and affecting GDP growth), or cut investment elsewhere. You could finance it with debt, and we all know how well this tends to go.

I don't know enough about the Chinese economy to even try to have an opinion as to where this money is coming from, and what they aren't spending it on but should. But the unwind is coming sooner or later. You can't subsidise something forever. You can't grow your GDP with subsidies. So what's going to give?

It might be that they are hoping to kill foreign industry, become a monopoly and milk it, like the US under Trump is trying to in smaller scale. But of they were a free economy, it would be a race - can they stay solvent for long enough? Liberal or not, they are still an economy, and you can't beat gravity forever. I'm curious how it plays out.

Protectionism policies are blocking low prices (what about tariffs ? what about monopolies ?) and are benefiting only the ones holding the knowledge and factories at the detriment of the rest of humanity.

Can't wait for ASML / TSMC / Zeiss equivalents so we can have access to memory sticks and GPUs / AI accelerators to run Qwen Super-Large distilled on Claude Zulu model, GTA VIII or whatever will come at that time.

Also ASML is not alone. In fact ASML can not exists without its partners, first and foremost American Department of Energy but also s IMEC in Belgium and Zeiss in Germany. Those are all SOTA in either R&D or production. They are not "some of the best" they are literally the best in their very complex expertise. In fact they have to collaborate reach such level.

... and yet, it's "just" that. There is nothing magical about ASML. Yes it might be practically impossible because of IP, economics, etc but still China (or anyone else) can definitely pour a lot of resources to try and make significant process. Will the result be competitive though in light of the moat ASML has, in particular partnerships, that is hard to imagine.

PS edit : I did like Chris Miller's "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" and FWIW did have a former colleague working at ASML and been invited to IMEC events.