Serious question: why is the US trying to (or is already preventing) China from acquiring EUV chip tech? What’s the reason for such an aggressive intervention in a free market?
There's no such thing as a free market in our world. It's just a myth. Everything is regulated or under the purview of treaties or laws.
The oligarchs in the west decided to outsource key industries to developing countries to increase their profit margins.
Now they're scrambling to fix those mistakes.
As globalism unwinds, there will be an open desire to roll back child labor and environmental laws as well as birth choice.
We'll get factories back in the USA - and wish we hadn't.
Or we'll see a massive expansion in prison labor, even worse than we have now.
The simple explanation here is the correct one: they oppose abortion on social grounds.
Correlation not causation.
Just earlier this year they were complaining that Chinese companies were ripping off their IP [0] and IIRC even within the last 2-3 years they were themselves hesitant to send bleeding edge tech over for similar reasons. I wonder what has caused their tune to change.
That said, if I'm reading the tea leaves properly...
I think the last couple years were a wake-up call to the US that not only are they overly dependent on other countries for critical components, but that China is far closer to becoming 'self sufficient' than us (1).
Ukraine was a bit of a wake-up call to us, that we are too afraid of nuclear escalation (2) but also to China that embargoes can happen more quickly than you'd expect and hurt almost as fast.
What this means however, is we are now both in a race for self sufficiency on this front.
... Really random question, I wonder why Mexico doesn't have more fabs?
----
1 - I think the US has a weird definition of 'self sufficiency' mind you. For instance in some cases it seems the attitude is 'Oh we did that again and can ramp up.' As a general comparison, I'm betting the possibility of getting a '100% China content' vehicle is far higher than getting a '100% USA content' vehicle.
2 - Without getting into it, there was a short window early on in the Ukraine conflict where I would have doubted Putin's willingness to go nuclear. IMO It's one of those cases where the would police card may have been worth playing, were it not for our missteps in using it over the last 20 years.
[0] - https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/11/asml_chinese_rival_ip...