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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually cautiously excited about new competition in high end semiconductor fabrication. Huawei and China won't just sit around twiddling their thumbs, they've got to manufacture chips somehow/somewhere.

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What you missed is the massive global interconnected supply chain that goes into building the fab (not the building, but the process equipment and software).

China’s isolationism will cause massive pains to do it all in house. If they can, we are all fucked.

But between investing a ton of money into that and negotiating with the US, I can only see China doing the former.

They've done it before (quite recently, too), whole tech supply chains inside China. I don't think the CCP would want to be seen as "begging" to lift the bans...

Their monoculture provides a lower ceiling for capability than the world at large. We aren't remotely fucked.

What you are calling monoculture is somewhere around 1/6th population of the world. If you take into the account the inroads that China has made into Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe we might be seeing ourselves entering another phase of the cold war.

Those inroads are disintegrating.

The quality of the deliverables hasn’t been great, they have been poorly managed and have left many countries either in significant debt or with onerous obligations.

That's the problem with state-driven investment. Most people are lazy and/or greedy, and given a known state-sponsored payday, have no incentive to deliver quality.

So even if the Chinese state may want the projects to go well, the conduit by which the projects are funded and managed doesn't have much more than shame and prison as sticks, and that's only for people who are caught.

I worry that you're right about this. I've been saying for a while now that I expect Africa to be a continent on which the US and China wage a new cold war

Guys you are really panicking here. No way China is going to do everything in-house. Crucial technology? For sure, but definitely not everything. China's isolationism is imposed on it by the United States (and not only to China, but to other countries as well as businesses everywhere is forced to NOT do business), and it is going to use all weights to find ways to do business with other countries.

China's isolationism is mainly self-imposed. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the modern internet is banned there. It has very strict currency controls that prevent its citizens from transferring funds out. Foreign businesses are very restricted in what they're allowed to do and what they can own. And if they make money, it can be very hard to get it out.

EU is trying to enter the game as well.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH...

>But putting a halt to a decrease is not enough. Now we must invest massively, with the objective to produce in Europe high performance processors (with a 2 to 3nm of feature size) and reach 20% of the world capacity in value.

That would be extremely nice, but sadly I don't see it happening right now. Strange, since the EU has some major designers and suppliers of specialized equipment for the purpose. But maybe we can get a fab in Eastern Europe somewhere in the future. Don't know why you're downvoted.

That's a nice speech, but it's only an aspiration. It also says all Europeans should have 1gbps internet by 2025, which suggests some fantasy is occurring.

Hm. Given the development of DSL/Cable/LTE/5G/whatnot speeds in the last few years, and more and more FTTC/FTTH roll outs it's not total unrealistic. I could have it, but I'm too cheap for that :-)

With ASML not delivering the much wanted machine, they have another hurdle to take. It will be a big challenge, but of course they will do it. It's the new arms race.

If they do it, can you imagine if they are willing to export that technology to say, US or EU?

They won't. So, why do we give such a flak to US/EU protecting their interests?

It is pretty straight forward to me.

That’s assuming the CCP can steal the necessary IP from their competitors.

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