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.
Producing 10x of 10-years old GPUs is not exactly useful for modern AI codebases for instance.
This matters for AI datacenters in particular, if they want to be autonomous in building them they need to be able to build advanced microprocessors locally.
But I agree that, given enough time, China should be able to. But Saab en Tesla handing over IP themselves, and phone makers letting China produce and assemble phones (maybe not as extensive these days anymore) is something different.
China has Money and Smart people. (and very effective corporate / nationstate espionage) so they can most certainly reproduce advanced machines.
They might not have incentive yet to do it because it will not make them popular, and potentially output products would be banned on US/EU. They play a long game and want US and EU consumers to ask tehir governments to please allow the chinese products.. so their market share is safe and stable.
I think once there is enough incentive for them they would do it. They simply do not want to do it currently.
> people overstate complexity of ASmL machines. They are not impossible to make or use, specialist work sure but its possible. The only reason why no one does it is: 1) IP laws, 2) Costs
The real reasons are: enormous complexity, lots of original research involved, deeply specialized supply chains. Recreating that takes lots of time and money. Even if you cut corners and steal IP. So that leaves China with 'time' as the real impediment. And who knows, AI will be a boost to get to that goal?
This isn't to say that automated translation is bad, I use it extensively, but not all interaction worth having is online.
No, not in this case. Becoming a leader in commodity white goods like a phones and cars is a different beast than EUV machines. The challenges are not even remotely comparable.
China doesn't have a Zeiss, it doesn't have an ASM, it doesn't have a Cymer, it doesn't have a Trumpf, and it doesn't have a dozen other domestic competitors to western suppliers of critical parts that make an EUV machine.
The "moat" we're talking about with private companies is that it's very hard for competitors to get enough funding to compete, and private investors are unwilling to invest in a company that will compete with a big established player. That's completely different when a state has a strategy and decides to invest to achieve a goal.
It might take them a decade, but they'll get there. Working on the basis that you can somehow stop China rather than merely delaying them is a comforting illusion.
So are modern Western cars - and arguably also phones.
If I'm forced to drive in a bug-riddled impossible-to-repair privacy-invading spaceship either way, why would I go for the overpriced outdated Western one rather than the affordable innovative Chinese one?
I would prefer a boring 2000s car with an electric drivetrain, but it's not like anyone is making them...
Vendor-lock is quite high, possibly higher in the US.
Look at iPhone, hardware is behind, restricted, unauditable privacy and questionable software in terms of performance (especially starting iOS 26, where you lost the choice for Liquid Glass).
Impossible to reasonably sync AirPods or watches, Macbook or choose the firmware version.
In comparison, the irony is that China offers the freedom (like with Qwen).
On these supposedly evil Chinese devices (phones, headphones, watches, etc), you have an open platform with great hardware, that you can modify as much as you want, and the only people who restrict you is... Google (making sure you cannot root without losing to important apps, so technically you can root, but practically you can't).
All the claims about "China = bad hardware and bad software" were true 20 years ago, but this is not the case anymore.
That being said, should certainly be quite cautious about default setup... you have US surveillance, PLUS, Chinese surveillance.
My in law has a BYD Seagull, fail to see how it lags compared to similarly priced cars.
Chinese cars are incredibly popular in Europe, because they are better cars at the same price tag, even the more expensive ones.
I think it's asinine to think their high end manufacturing is crap, keeps us non competitive, let alone ignoring most of our stuff or large parts of it already comes from China.
And it has nothing to do with wages, modern high end manufacturing is highly automated and skilled engineers are as expensive as in southern or central Europe.
This doesn't mean they will always be behind though.
If I was ASML I would have an AI generated honeypot of techniques that are plausible but incorrect for China to go after on this and make sure you get hacked by them.
Though to be fair, I think everyone knew that China was always going to have their 100% domestic chip manufacturing supply chain. I'd argue that the blocks were mainly a delaying tactic by the USA oligarchy. Simply blocking ASML from doing business with China would in itself motivate China to move faster, but I guess the decision makers and their advisors calculated that it would be slower than letting China buy the machinery and reverse engineer it.
Of course that didn't really work out. The only reason the media is picking up on these stories is that China, did, get their hands on the machinery, but then... of course they did.
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
China’s willpower and centralized deployment of that willpower is legendary.
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.
They basically (almost) did. In 2013 ASML bought US Cymer(the maker of EUV light sources) and in 2001 ASML acquired the US-based lithography equipment manufacturer Silicon Valley Group (SVG) after it had encountered liquidity issues.
Basically, the US had everything needed, the EUV light sources and lithography machines, just spread over different companies facing financial issues, so ASML came at the right moment and bought them all and integrated into their own business.
Just because ASML is based in NL doesn't mean all of its EUV secret sauce IP is domestically Dutch. Most of it comes from the US, which is why the US government maintains such a high influence of ASML's trade restrictions.
It is true those companies you referred to were bought and their IP has helped ASML in _EUV_, but they had 20 years of European IP before that, all related other parts of the lithography machine (and not EUV) that made ASML the company it is.
If you think that complexity is only in (light) source for EUV (is it already profitable for ASML, by the way?), then you have no idea the complexity of that machine!
Disclaimer: I worked in their metrology department.
The main flabbergasting stuff about Coca-Cola is the fact that they choose to use HFCS in some countries, and sugar in others, and this is due to... protectionism again that artificially skews competition like for electronics.
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.
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.
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.
A nation state will fail at most things, because there's no budget, and there's commercial pressure, democratic pressure etc.
One of the few things to make it work is lack of competition. Iran: they have a nuclear program because they can't buy what they want from the market.
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.
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.
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/5/ieee-iscas-tau-scaling
[Shanghai, China, May 25, 2026] Today, at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), He Tingbo from HUAWEI delivered a keynote speech titled "New Semiconductor Path in Practice". In her speech, she presented the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry. This law proposes replacing geometric scaling with time (τ) scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems. Based on this principle, innovative technologies such as LogicFolding can be used to continuously compress signal propagation delay and steadily improve transistor density, which will drive the ongoing evolution of semiconductors and electronic systems.
Because the light source comes from the US.
monssooon•1h ago
usrnm•34m ago