I also have reservations on whether the academia can surpass the speed of commercial R&D teams on semiconductor tech. I will believe it when I see it.
ASML's machines have over 4,000 parts in their own supply chains. Many of these are high technology which even ASML does not know how to produce. Many of them come from the U.S. and Europe. The EUV process ASML uses in its most advanced machines was only possible due to investments made by the U.S. government and U.S. companies.
What is happening here is not an attempt by the U.S. and Japanese governments to compete with Taiwan. It's an investment to ensure the next generation of lithographic technology plays out much like the current generation. Meaning the U.S. it's allied governments and many of their respective companies invest enough to acquire leverage over the technology and thus are able to locked China and other countries out of it.
Fabrication is far easier to catch up than bootstrapping. If a country started today, they could subsidize fabrication and within eighteen months they could be making strides to deliver more chips from within. It might literally take a decade or two for a new company to build ASMLs supply chains and replicate one of their machines and that would be 10-20 with no production growth, they would just at that point be getting started.
It is TSMC who integrates the ASML machine into a node. A node being made of dozens of machines performing hundreds of discrete steps with right parameters in the right order. It is TSMC who build fabs with enormously short lead times.
Bootstrapping a whole new lithographic process is not. That is something you would have to invest in for years with essentially nothing to show for it. That is a harder problem from a market standpoint and a political standpoint.
But we're not talking generally about chip fabrication here. We're talking about what is going on with the investments from the U.S. and Japan in next generation chip production. And the bottom line is the investment here is made relatively unrelated to "competing" with Taiwan as a global chip exporter. The most likely thing is that the technology invested here will be used in Taiwan to fabricate chips.
https://www.photonicsonline.com/doc/asml-joins-euv-llc-team-...
It's history as a government/corporate collaboration is the reason ASML can't export EUV machines to China without US permission.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43294946
tldr just like China today you couldnt just import western electronics to Japan, or gasp own a controlling stake in Japanese companies.
And this was the result:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...
"JAPAN AND THE BIG SQUEEZE September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..."
"Japan's raid on the American market dates back to 1956, when the largest Japanese manufacturers formed the Home Electronic Appliance Market Stabilization Council, an illegal production cartel. The intent of the cartel was to monopolize the domestic market for television receivers, radios and other home electric products and to exclude foreign imports. Once their home market was secure, they would launch a drive against the far richer American market."
Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c
That doesn't change that in the mid-70's the Japanese chip manufacturers were failing, and by "pooling together a bunch of also-ran teams together" they actually made better quality chips than the US, not just cheaper ones.