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.

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.

https://archive.is/tKZmn

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

If you hate invasions, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.

> 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.

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.

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.

Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.

We will also see talent pipeline erosion.

Just further Western industrial policy failure.

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 saying that AMD is a worse choice because of drivers.

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.

>> 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.