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.
Material conditions shape history
It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
At the risk of starting a fight... I would point at America's religious history, and the continuing threads of that today that increasingly see scientific/materialist thought as a direct threat to their ideas of how a society ought to be organized.
The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.
Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.
Or do you yourself have a religious belief in strict human blank slate equality?
They are made so in the Angloamerican West. The establishment wants them to focus on 'values' instead. Because if the people started thinking about material conditions, they would topple the system that concentrates 99% of the wealth in the hands of the 0.1%.
That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.
> 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.
It isn't a "chinese way of thinking". It is assumed everywhere that some level "corruption and fraud" is baked into any large scale investment or endeavor. It's simply a matter of managing it so as not to consume the whole project.
That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it. They're the only country whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by UN. That's the context behind the quote (directed at domestic doubters), every other country in the world has to pick and choose what to specialize in, PRC doesn't, so as long as item is not made by god, PRC can figure out how to build it.
The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true. There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
Ignoring the practical reality that you need resources, capacity, good planning, and so on to actually do something. I understood OP as saying the mindset in China is that they want to do it all. They are willing to invest even in things that would have poor ROI, if they can come into an industry and undercut by taking a smaller margin they will.
If so, that is a difference in attitude. In the west, we are only interested in returns that beat our alternatives. Capital is divested based on maximizing return on investment. This is why we even allowed many industries in the first place to move to China and we exited those segments domestically.
A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.
States may disappear, nations may vanish, and once-advanced countries can become backward. Most of them will never return to their former national glory. “If others can do it, we can do it” only becomes a true national characteristic if it is persistently pursued, strictly implemented, and internalized into the national mindset. Japan clearly does not fall into this category.
In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset. Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition. Essentially, it is not a national character. Look at Japan’s reliance on fax machines and Yahoo, or the chaos in Germany’s train system—it shows that this is an advantage created by a particular population with a special disposition, useful only for a limited time. The pace of deindustrialization in these two countries is also very fast: Japan now heavily depends on tourism, and Germany has become something of a joke.
If you browse YouTube or other video platforms, you can see that the people of China and the United States have, and continue to have, the national confidence and “hands-on” culture of the world’s largest industrial powers. In the U.S., there are many farm owners and ordinary laborers who are skilled at making and producing things—they are the foundation of the country. Capitalism merely led the U.S. down a different path.
> This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
Is there any evidence that this kind of homogeneous "national character" is objectively real? Or is it just another story that people tell themselves?
You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.
But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.
The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.
That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.
The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.
The other difference - which is even more significant - is that China is already far ahead in advanced manufacturing. The US was lightyears ahead of the Soviets in advanced manufacturing, which is what allowed us to win in the 70s and 80s. Now, we're so far behind it's not even funny. Sure, the West still makes some ultra-precise machines for EUV, but look where most of the components in those machines are made...
That said, the U.S., if it wants to stay ahead, also needs to fight trends toward reducing competition via de facto monopolistic behaviors by mega corporations with co-opted governmental protections.
China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently. Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.
This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation. The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better. They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.
And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.
For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.
I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.
Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.
I don't have the data to back it up, but I think that there is actually the same amount of will and talent in China as in the West
There is not much left of communism in China besides the name, it's more akin to a government steered economy, which arguably is very similar to what the west had when we moved at our peak speed, albeit more authoritarian. They still have what we mostly lost: a long term historical view of geopolitic.
This implies copying what someone else did. Rather than inventing something new. I know it's not what you meant but if it wasn't made by God it's because it's already made by someone else. The sentence says to me more about copying than some relentless pursuit. The people who invented the thing to copy, those were more relentless presumably.
And then again the Chinese invented plenty over the years. These generalizations are bit meh.
But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?
In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.
None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.
Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
Something to think about if considering the purchase of a DJI drone.
Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.
There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?
With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.
That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.
Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.
Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.
I don't think the Chinese government will be too upset if cheap Chinese GPUs work best with China-made games. It will be quite the cultural coup if, in 20 years time, the most popular shooter is a Chinese version of Call of Duty or Battlefield.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.
Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.
Thats at least how things got where they are now.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.
They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger
I already got an Intel Arc to support more market competition (A580 was rough, B580 is a decent daily driver) and if the prices weren’t absolutely insane would have gotten the 245K (better than my 5800X, but not for the price).
They're kinda rubbish, but as a starting point / MVP for a parallel gaming hardware ecosystem its 100% viable.
>> Due to Memory Shortages
I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer. They're a gateway into the overall AI ecosystem.
Having feet planted there also make sure they can play the local game when that begins to blow up. Nvidia wants a robotics play, too.
This is a pragmatic choice. And most of the money is in commercial.
You mean, NV is after the money with a heavy heart and a sad tear or two over the abandoned consumers, like "We love you so much but sorry, we must go pragmatic on you"?
> And most of the money is in commercial.
This is a serious systemic failure and it's even wilder that it's accepted without question.
Edit: I meant ATI but I guess AMD bought ATI in 2006! I thought that happened in the 2010s for some reason.
We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
Just further Western industrial policy failure.
Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.
Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.
> We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.
[0] https://www.advocate.com/politics/pam-bondi-trans-equality-b... [1] https://ncac.org/news/advocacy-isnt-terrorism [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/26/us-trump-targets-opponen...
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
The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc. It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first.
This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc.
However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
A free electron laser (FEL) uses free electrons (electrons not attached to a nucleus) as a lasing medium to produce light. The light would shine through a mask and expose photoresist more or less just like the light from ASML’s tin plasma contraption, minus the tin plasma. FELs, in principle, can produce light over a very wide range of wavelengths, including EUV and even shorter.
That DARPA thing is a maskless electron beam lithography system: the photoresist is exposed by hitting it directly with electrons.
Electrons have lots of advantages: they have mass, so much less kinetic energy is needed to achieve short wavelengths. They have charge, so they can be accelerated electrically and they can be steered electrically or magnetically. And there are quite a few maskless designs, which saves the enormous expense of producing a mask. (And maskless lithography would let a factory make chips that are different in different wafers, which no one currently does. And you need a maskless technique to make masks in the first place.) There were direct-write electron-beam research fabs, making actual chips, with resolution comparable to or better than the current generation of ASML gear, 20-30 years ago, built at costs that were accessible to research universities.
But electrons have a huge, enormous disadvantage: because they are charged, they repel each other. So a bright electron beam naturally spreads out, and multiple parallel beams will deflect each other. And electrons will get stuck in electrically nonconductive photoresists, causing the photoresist to (hopefully temporarily) build up a surface charge, interfering with future electron beams.
All of that causes e-beam lithography to be slow. Which is why those research fabs from the nineties weren’t mass-producing supercomputers.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3333641/chin...
That mention of "quantum" seems suspicious, but it's beyond me to judge whether their presentations are credible:
http://lumi-universe.com/?about_33/
If they actually produce machines that can do ~14 nm stuff on "desktop" sized equipment, perhaps we'll see a lot of it eventually. As far as I can remember a lot of decent processing and storage chips were made with ~14 nm processes over the last decade or so.
My sole personal experience with any sort of harmonic generation was being in the room while some grad students debugged a 266nm laser that consisted of a boring 1064nm Nd:YAG laser followed by two frequency doublers. Quite a lot of power was lost in each stage, and the results of accidentally letting the full 1064nm source power loose were mildly spectacular.
I wish Lumiverse luck getting any appreciable amount of power out of their system. (FELs, in contrast, seem to be cable of monstrous power output — that’s never been the problem AFAIK.)
P.S. never buy a 532nm laser from a non-reputable source. While it’s impressive that frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers are small and cheap enough to be sold as laser pointers these days, it’s far too easy for highly dangerous amounts of invisible 1064nm radiation to leak out, whether by carelessness or malice. I have a little disreputable ~510nm laser pointer, which I chose because, while I don’t trust the specs at all, 510nm is likely produced directly using a somewhat unusual solid state source, and it can’t be produced at all using a doubled Nd:YAH laser. The color is different enough that I’m confident they’re not lying about the wavelength.
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.
Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
Unless you are talking about Israel :P
Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.
Eventually less and less people want to go down this route so we get "people just not having the attitude of getting things done".
The real question is will Chinese people go down that same road or will the fact that there is so much cutthroat competition there keep people in line?
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
You’re missing forest for the trees. ASML at the moment has the monopoly on these machines. This is not only a great tool for the West to keep China at bay, but also a way to maintain economic dominance. Even if they can’t get the machine up and running until 2030, and the machine is a generation behind, China has effectively gained leverage in world theater.
From geopolitical perspective, it’s huge. Right now Taiwan produces the world’s chips, so China plays nice. The minute they can produce their own chips, even an older generation, they can invade Taiwan anytime they want. And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.
This basically just means Europe wont have older chips.
TSMC is already producing a significant percentage of their chips in Arizona. And they've even slated ~30% of their total production of 2nm chips and better will be produced in USA by 2028-2029.
Is it war ? in a "everything is a war" political sense, perhaps, but not in any other sense.
We're left with "massive project" for the analogy, that's kinda weak really.
They might be, but if they plan on getting a factory running in 3 years, they're presumably planning on using what they purchased.
Once they break even they can overshoot into shocking new technology territory.
I think that both Germany and USSR were not in the least shocked ... just the USA had the resources to finish it.
Maybe it was because we had all those immigrants working on it (e.g. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann)!
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.
China eventually gave up the plan in 1960's not because it didn't want to but because the balance of the power weighting over to west China. In 80's and 90's both agree to make peace given the premise that both sides belong to China.
TSMC was a product of industry policy from None-democratic China government. The founder Morris Chang ， an American born in the west China ，never visited China before 50 years old.
Both China (before 90') and west China used to want reunification , by force or not. China changed a bit later. The motivation of west China to invade China has little to do with chips although US thought that's the critical incentive. West China will still let TSMC provide the chips to the world in case it would have successfully invaded China in my view.
Taiwan is too dependent on the west, it too should know it can't actually resist an invasion, and that the west won't do much when it comes down to it. Its interests would have been served best if it sought good trade relations with the PRC, so that the PRC will continue to rely on TSMC. it should be providing west-china with all the nice chips the west is forbidding it from having. It should have been more like india and less like south korea.
Isn't that "other than" clause a big deal, though? I've read a survey and a number of articles from defense and foreign policy types, and the general feeling is there's a ~25% chance that China will invade Taiwan this decade. That's really damn big. If there's rollback in Taiwan then the first island chain could plausibly fall, or if not you will surely see Japan and maybe South Korea nuclearize. Why must we keep assuming the best with these security calculations instead of believing someone when they keep saying what they're going to do?
This will probably never happen. All countries are rivals, and the semblance of cooperation is really just the manifestation of a power imbalance.
China grew into their big boy pants and can hold their own on the international stage. They have no need to be cooperative because they are in the International Superpower Club. Their strategic ambitions do not align with those of their rivals, and they are strong enough to not need to play nice anymore.
Now that the US has also dropped their visage of being the benevolent world leader, there's even less reason for China to pretend to be cooperative. At this point, it's a matter of who is more apt to invade your country, US or China? And you buy weapons from the other one.
Maybe we see more "cooperation" between China and the EU or South America. But that will be entirely because those regions are under duress.
I'd speculate that if they don't invade during Trump's term, they never will, and will pursue a different course down the road. China is nothing if not patient.
The wafers have to be positioned to nanometer accuracy repeatedly and at high speed! It’s hard to believe that’s even possible, let alone commercially viable.
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"?
This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.
Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.
Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.
Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.
The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.
How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?
As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss.
Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
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.
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.
Since Jan 2024, China has on average constructed 23GW of new solar power every month. So China has effectively been adding a "world's largest dam" worth of solar power, every single month for the last 24 months.
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.
> Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.
I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...
The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
Once inside, he recognized other former ASML colleagues who were also working under aliases and was instructed to use their fake names at work to maintain secrecy, the person said.But the science was probably not
I don't think this is classified technology, although asml would like it if they were punished.
And even if it's patented, China has been stealing everything with little consequence
While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.
Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
I wonder what could be used here, non-compete? IP infringement? Or doing it "for all mankind"?
As for knowledge, the YouTube channel Branch Education explained EUV lithography in great detail, sponsored by ASML itself.
My impression is that the knowledge is not that secretive, the precision required at every step is the key.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the US pressured Japan to up their exchange rate which was one of the factors in their stagflation. Germany never threatened the power of the US
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.
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".
If you hate invasions so much, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.
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.
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 ... ...
Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
"China is 20 years behind"
Horribly dishonest. But they all talked in lockstep: lawmakers + "experts".
FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819
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.