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Comment by saidnooneever | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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Why do you think they don't want to do it? I find that a weird statement, and your given reasons don't make sense to me. This is one of their core programs, and as part of that have taken over some IP via espionage programs. China is actively trying to build one for quite some time now.

  > 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

Citation needed, if these were the real roadblocks China would have had the machines by now already. Even with all the parts at hands (don't forget: from a total of 5100 suppliers) the Chinese couldn't assemble one. It is complex with a lot of know-how involved.

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?

You are aware that ASML is a small company prior to EUV?

And they only allocated a small number of employees and resources to bring their first EUV machine to market?

ASML had 7,685 employees prior to their EUV success (Including contracts), of these 7,685 employees only 2500 were engineers. ASML put half of these engineers to develop the NXE:3100 and they only spent 10 billion dollars.

So total resources = 1250 engineers, 10 billion to make EUV a reality and 13 years.

So yes the complexity and difficulty of EUV machines is vastly overstated. The amount of resources spent on it is coins found in couch cushions to huge mega corps.

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