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Comment by thePunisher | Hacker News Reader

Their biggest problem is procuring EUV machines from ASML. Setting up a factory with these machines is no big hurdle for them if they are able to buy the machines. The U.S. is pressuring the Dutch government to prohibit their sale, with some success.

More likely China will now try to steal ASML's secrets and manufacture or duplicate the machines. ASML is known to have a large number of foreign contractors, and there are sure to be a few Chinese among them. If I where them, I'd quietly ban al ethnic Chinese from working at their company.

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>If I where them, I'd quietly ban al ethnic Chinese from working at their company.

ASML is a Dutch company, and Dutch law prohibits discriminating against people on the basis of ethnic origin.[1]

1. https://www.government.nl/topics/discrimination/prohibition-...

> If I where them, I'd quietly ban al ethnic Chinese from working at their company.

That's a horrible and dangerous suggestion and I hope the the world is above racial profiling. Given historical precedent and the difficulty in developing extreme ultraviolet lithography, it's reasonable to expect CCP has their top hackers and human intelligence operatives (both paid an unpaid PRC nationals and non-PRC nationals of varying ethnicities) attacking ASML to try and steal its invaluable trade secrets.

Even ethnic Chinese from Taiwan have been known to spy for Communist China (like the Chinese American who stole the plans for the latest U.S. nuclear warheads at Lawrence Livermore and is now teaching at a university in China).

The Chinese have a strong group identity and their nationality doesn't matter a great deal to them. In their mind they're Chinese, no matter where they live.

Harvard professor Charles Lieber had similar allegations, and he's not ethnically Chinese. There's millions of ethnic Chinese in Taiwan, Malaysia and elsewhere who are against Communist China. I agree the CCP has a strong 'ethnonationalist' ideology that tries to go beyond nationality. This needs to be strongly pushed back upon, but banning all ethnic Chinese is not the answer. Please keep in mind the centuries of historical context with anti-Asian immigration sentiment ("Yellow Peril"). I agree given the risks the world should put great thought into limiting (even banning) all immigration from the PRC because the security risks are too great. But that law should not apply to Taiwan, Malaysia etc if the people immigrating have proven themselves anti-CCP.

My motto is "better safe than sorry" as far as China is concerned. This banning doesn't need to occur at every company, only at the ones which are strategically important, such as defense and cutting-edge high-tech.

Don't give up America's values for even more state sponsored discrimination based on ethnicity. It does mean PRC nationals and others continue to steal, but that's something to be managed through the legal system.

The Chinese are not playing by the rules, why should we?

We should only play fair with nations that do the same. The other ones we put in the grinder.

Didn't it took ASML ages to be able to build EUV Machines?

I don't think you can just replicate something like a EUV machine from them in any way.

You probably need highly specialized workshops for tons of different components and all of those workshops have to go through the same innovation cycle.

Yes, these machines are incredibly complex. Even the laser source is a $200M machine from Cymer that implements the same principles as the nations ignition facility by lasing microscopic droplets of molten tin that are falling in a vacuum. That requires rapid closed loop tracking of the tin droplets. It’s perhaps replicable but there’s a lot of art in EUV that took 30 years to develop. It’s not a simple job to clone that.

And by the time you’ve replicated that, then state of the art will have moved significantly.

It took ASML a long time to perfect these machines, but once they nailed it I'm pretty sure it's no big deal for anyone to duplicate it if they knew how to avoid all the pitfalls.

It would save the Chinese decades if they stole ASML's secrets instead of trying to figure it out on their own. Most likely they will simply take the shortcut and then start selling the machines at half the price ASML is selling them for (as they do with almost everything).

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