China begins producing advanced chipmaking deep-ultraviolet lithography machines | Hacker News Reader

China begins producing advanced chipmaking deep-ultraviolet lithography machines

reuters.com

110 pointsck2118 comments

After living and working in China 10yrs and fundamentally experiencing the growth rate and culture, it's been a bit horrifying to watch the Western world consistently decide withholding tech from China and giving them no other option but develop their own tech, is a good idea. They are the ultimate long-term planners and I have no doubt the existing gaps will be relatively short lived before China closes them.

I don't see how the alternatives ends any differently? We manufacture in China, they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.

The steelman of the argument is that, due to legacy in technology and comparative advantage, unless they expect a serious supply chain tech, many core technologies will be too expensive to duplicate for China and so there will be areas where they will not advance. There is some amount of evidence that was true for lithography, they did not seem to be making much progress until they were forced to, and there didn't seem to be enough capital available in China to catch up.

Of course, the extent to which they was true and for how long it would be true is up for debate, but it's not a prima facie foregone conclusion

They have the entire resources of their state available for funding.

They will catch up and pass the West.

Take nuclear weapons: even Pakistan and North Korea were able to catch up.

Poor examples. Pakistan with a lot of Saudi backing, NK with a lot of Chinese backing.

That aside, China will master chip making at bleeding edge global scale, just as it did with EVs and rare earth processing, etc.

How is it a poor example?

State level resources - even from decrepit countries like Pakistan and NK - will ALWAYS beat VC funding or whatever.

Because internal state level resources in Pakistan and NK didn't get them nuclear weapons, both countries required external assistance.

The point being made about China is that China secured a production monopoly on rare earth processing entirely on its own. As it did for EV's and will do for dense chip fabrication.

External assistance for sure, from state actors who would never assist a VC funded startup.

Your point about China is exactly the same as mine. A state determined to build something will eventually succeed, especially if it's a country as single minded as China.

I'm not an expert at all so I have to wonder which core technologies were/are too expensive to duplicate for China? Afaik semiconductors represent the cutting edge of manufacturing technology; if China is able to duplicate (or even innovate, as demonstrated by "3d Logic folding") in this industry, I can't imagine how any other sectors would be too expensive to duplicate.

Who knows how far they progressed in lithography once it became clear that withholding technology would be the official state policy-- I heard the Chinese state got involved in developing EUV in a way comparable to the Manhattan project in scale and secrecy.

The cost is not just pure development. There are very high switching costs, and downstream opportunity costs affecting the entire ecosystem. As an example, Nikon was competitive with ASML in DUV for a while, but no one was willing to switch because the cost/risk was way too high. For lithography, that was essentially the issue - no serious foundry was willing to take the massive risk to move away from ASML - and, worse, to skip EUV.

A second reason is that Chinese foundries still had to compete with foreign foundries. The cost of doing lithography with new Chinese DUV machines will be significantly higher than with ASML DUV and then significantly higher than with ASML EUV. So to build an ecosystem that can one day truly compete with ASML, you'd need the entire Chinese semi industry to take significant losses to get to the point where they can compete with ASML and pose a threat in the market.

There is still many sectors like this where China has some kind of parity, but at a total cost of ownership so much higher than western competitors than they are not a serious market threat in the near future. In fact, the US, EU, etc... are in similar positions. Unless the Chinese economy becomes much stronger than the US/EU across the board, one would expect it to be case due to comparative advantage - the cost of directing industry to ignore superior alternatives will slow them down in other fields, unless the Chinese economy is just that much more effective. So without sanctions, it's difficult for the Chinese state to force enough cooperation to solve the issue without spending amounts of money that are a significant drag even to China.

What comparative advantage exists for high technology? I get it for things like agriculture and resources, but what intrinsic barriers are there to computer chips and cars? Especially when we're talking about the heart of the global supply chain, where there really is a comparative advantage in that standing up a logistical competitor would take decades of focused investment.

Anyone who understands China knows that they want to be the master of their own destiny, and China understands that this means self sufficiency when it comes to technology. This is one of the many lessons they learned from the "century of shame". Anyone who thinks they don't want to eventually dominate all technologies in the name of security hasn't really been paying attention.

There is definitely comparative advantage in certain technologies which depend on a niche supply chain with deep materials science experience, simply due to experience and network economies. China has many such advantages too.

Lithography is very hard to dominate because if you want to do so, you have to convince your ecosystems to switch to domestic suppliers. But in the short term, they don't want to as that will hurt their competitiveness. That's why, for many sectors still and for lithography until the bans, there was no domestic program with realistic prospects to ever truly outcompete.

None of that is inherent. You could have said the same thing a decade ago about vehicle production, or microelectronics a decade before that, and yet here we are. The lesson we should learn from Comac is that China is quite happy to use its local market as a testbed until the technology is mature, and in the same way that it's only a matter of time before Comac has an internationally certified airframe and comes after the aerospace incumbents, it's also only a matter of time before they catch up in chip fabrication. This isn't about money for them.

Sure, none of that is inherent. But do note that China never caught up in internal combustion engines. They had to wait for a fundamental paradigm change to catch up, and were not able to copy ICE technology to a satisfactory level. Similarly, China has been able to make serviceable airframes for decades, it's just until now that they're getting close to price competition - and likely Comac will be more expensive for decades to come.

My point is moreso that they can succeed in many domains, but it's mechanically unlikely they'll succeed on some domains unless we force their hand. Semis were one of them.

China moved directly to hybrid drivetrains, which is where the future of the internal combustion engine lies. They did this while pushing EV technology, and it gave them a fundamental advantage because low voltage hybrids are not the future of cars.

It's also too early to say whether or not they managed to catch up in ICE technology, because it takes time to put 500k kms on millions of drivetrains, and they haven't been selling cars globally at scale for long enough to pass that litmus test. We're also talking about a moving target; if they went straight to hybrids without perfecting traditional engines, does it really matter? I'm not sure that it does when the fundamental technology is largely the same, and they're putting out hybrid drivetrains in pickups that that eclipse the competition in terms of performance. Maybe the longevity isn't there right now, but it seems naive to claim that they never caught up, when they're right there in the thick of it in the current global market, in all drivetrain technologies that matter.

They didn't go straight, though. Chinese companies have been working for years on ICE. In fact, the largest companies were focused on ICE cars, and many were outcompeted by domestic EV upstarts.

Chinese cars have been sold worldwide for decades, they just weren't competitive with western cars even in very poor African countries.

We do have a pretty good idea of the quality of the current crop of Chinese ICE engines. They aren't great - I can go into more detail if you want.

From what I can see, nobody bought Chinese cars because the styling was terrible. BYD hiring western designers is what suddenly made Chinese cars desirable, because it kicked other brands into gear.

The forefront of Chinese ICE development today is coming from EV upstarts working on hybrid engines, not the likes of SAIC selling LDVs. There are numerous credible reports of Chinese hybrid engines hitting state-of-the-art thermal efficiencies, and the new wave of Chinese utility vehicles coming out have performance numbers that make everything else look laughable by comparison. It remains to be seen whether or not they can reach the kind of reliability and parts availability that the market expects, but Toyota at least is taking the threat very seriously.

And circling back to the earlier point, there doesn't seem to have been an effective comparative advantage keeping China out of the market. I don't consider hybrid engines to be anything other than ICEs, because they still require injectors, heads, the timing assembly, pumps, etc., and whether or not the ancillaries are mechanically driven or electronic is mostly moot in my opinion. This latest wave of hybrid engines is the just the continuation of a process that has been happening for a hundred years (and is already mature in other transport segments). And in any case, Chinese automakers are here, and we're seeing the biggest upheaval in the automotive industry in 50 years as they overtake Japanese brands in key markets.

>We do have a pretty good idea of the quality of the current crop of Chinese ICE engines. They aren't great - I can go into more detail if you want.

Sure, I'm always happy to talk engines.

  they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.

I think this is outdated thinking in 2026. It's more like western companies go to China, look at designs that China has done, buy them in bulk directly from the factory, ask for small modifications, then slap their own logos on the products.

Then these western brands add a big markup on the products. So it isn't that western companies can't compete on price. It's just that the prices from Chinese companies are much closer to the source without western markup.

A huge portion of products you're buying on Amazon from western brands were actually fully designed and manufactured in China.

Not only that, go to a trade fair in China and you'll see that many of their products have surpassed the West in quality and design. They just haven't been exported to the west for various reasons including tariffs, marketing, no western partner. A big business opportunity in the next few years is to figure out how to help Chinese businesses export worldwide - usually marketing/branding/localization expertise.

I worked in China for 9 years and I really don’t think it makes much of a difference. China is not dumb enough to think that just because they can get it from the west today they can get it from them tomorrow. They were always going to develop their own semiconductor and jet turbine tech and industries, among other. They didn’t do it just to spite the west for not selling them the chips they wanted.

Sure but nobody in the world is denying that China's recent lightspeed advances in these areas isn't due to the trade war Trump started in his first term. It had an immediate and massive impact on China's economy and they had an equally massive response to it. China experienced the equivalent of the 1973 energy crisis that the US experienced in response to its role in the 1973 Yom Kippur War

China started these investments long before Trump was on the radar, during later Bush and early Obama. They might have upped it from $10 billion to $20 billion, but the ball was already rolling in 2017.

No, you are wrong. Without the blacklisting and export bans the DUV machine in the article would not exist today.

Absolutely and I'm shocked how unaware people are about this issue. This was massive news. China went from self sufficiency on chips of about 10% after decades to over 33% self sufficiency in just a few years after Trump's trade war of 2017/2018 (which Biden did not back down from and Trump only ramped up in his second term)

And its not just chips. It was seen as a total affront of china moving up the tech value chain. They ramped up EVs, clean energy, industrial software, robotics, etc. The Chinese economy of 2017 is radically different from the Chinese economy economy today.

agree. what people dont understand is that the blacklisting is what created motivation for investing capital, manpower and years of time into these companies, or initiatives inside existing companies. most of this would have never gotten off the ground without the incentive they created.

otoh they had a coordination problem and the idiot ``us`` solved it for them

Withholding technology is the only tool we have. If we let them have the tech it's not like they'll start depending on us. They will simply replicate the machinery and then someone else will be writing a comment on Nacker Hews in this alternative Earth about how we were such fools in the West to simply let them have our technology thinking that would make them depend on us. In fact, we have this evidence because all the news about Hygon Dhyana being based on a nerfed Zen 1 had all Internet commentary shaped like "We're such idiots to let them have this. We are the eternal morons!"

Literally every non-embargoed technology they have access to they instantly build and enhance. They have industrial and manufacturing iteration ability far beyond what we have. They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants. They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power with divergent objectives and thinking that handing them R&D is going to slow a negative outcome for us is wishful thinking.

Sometimes the only plan available is not a great plan. That's just how it is. The world sometimes gives you constraints that don't have a happy solution. You race down the precipice on whatever you have. And look what we earned for it: almost a full decade before they got here. That's amazing.

The US only had the bomb exclusively for 4 years before the USSR got that. We had 18 months before they got nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles. We got 8 years of EUV that China couldn't match us in. Precious 8 years and ongoing.

For highly complex technologies that require tons of capex to get anywhere, Chinese firms are perfectly happy to depend on foreign companies if they are allowed to.

Chinese chipmakers weren't willing to use the first batch of domestic DUV machines because they simply weren't as good as foreign alternatives, and this made it doubly difficult for domestic machine manufacturers: they couldn't get revenue for selling machines, and they couldn't learn from their customers' experiences. The Chinese government, for example, is now apparently withholding Nvidia chips from being imported - despite the export ban being partially lifted from the US side - in order to incentivize local companies to use domestic NPUs instead.

Similarly, on a personal level, most of the (technical) folks I know here in China are using Claude/GPT models because they want to use the best models available. But, companies like Bytedance (Doubao) cannot use such models to serve their customers, and ordinary folks also cannot access these models without workarounds. As such, the market for domestic AI models is huge, which has uplifted a lot of the current AI model providers.

Ultimately, this creates a funny conundrum: sanctions mean that certain parts of the Chinese population can still access the "banned" tech - able to experiment with it and learn from it - while spurring domestic companies to seek domestic alternatives.

Okay, I think you’re right about some things. Coordinating a market economy is not straightforward. Individual participants will buy what is optimal for them.

By embargoing them we provided a coordination mechanism. Chinese semiconductor manufacturers now had a captive market to sell into and the state was able to incentivize production without too much waste.

But the thing that strikes me is that China was already trying to do this. SMIC et al were already funded by the Big Fund. And they generally succeed in industrial policy. It’s true that a GPU can’t be torn apart and replicated like a car factory can. But they were already trying and they were already attracting sufficient numbers.

I suspect we couldn’t have stopped them. DUV tech like this has been already explored deeply. And the loss is in power and scale - both of which China can compensate for elsewhere. We are power constrained. They are not. If they want to run 3x DCs for every one of ours they can do it.

It’s not like we don’t rent them GPUs. My friends do that. It’s entirely legal and Chinese companies don’t balk at needing to rent B300s. The whole thing isn’t resting on whether they want to capex it or opex it. It’s that they want domestic capability and we needed to trade off building them a coordination mechanism vs slowing them down. And we did this thing and it did that.

In a world where we sell them top of the line GPUs and allow ASML to sell them EUV do we think that the geolock on those devices stops China when they decide to replicate it? Or do you think they succeed at industrial espionage, that their local techs get as good at using the machines as TSMC does, and that they eventually transfer whatever learnings they have to what they can produce?

> They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power

Equivalent is your wishful thinking seeping through.

> Withholding technology is the only tool we have.

The US has the strongest military in the world, tight control of a large part of the world economy, unprecedented cultural soft power, a permanent vetoing seat at the UN security counsel, vast territories, a 50-year headstart in space, thousands of nukes, dozens of cyber organizations with deep roots everywhere.

The embargoes and tariffs are literally a skill issue.

The US had the strongest military in the world using outdated 20th century metrics. The new reality is the world is watching the US losing the war against Iran, depleting critical weapons inventories that need China’s supply chain to be rebuilt.

When the French used colorful obsolete uniforms in WWI, it was a skill issue. They had all the time in the world to modernize, but got cocky and made a terrible mistake.

The US made their military supply chain too complex, and in several points tied to private interests more than national security. It's not just the rare earths (that is a lame excuse), it's how insanely bloated the supply chain is due to too many hands on the pot. That is the major US vulnerability right now, and not letting that go (those private interests controlling a lot of stuff) is choking the US.

Most importantly, the war on Iran is asymmetrical, so it's not about having a powerful military. It's more a failure of soft power than strength. That soft power loss was also a skill issue (ostracized many international allies, etc).

It's more like the US broke its own toys and doesn't want China to fill the power vacuum it has put itself in.

> They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants.

Oh no!!!

And yea, to think china will be ``equivalent`` to you is such a westoid delusion i dont even know what to tell you

maybe keep dreaming

There is this thing called payback. Chinese has a history of ultimate payback. The infamous very first one written down was eunuch Zhao Gao wiped clean entire Qin clan of Qin dynasty. WIPE CLEAN. When Deng met up with Thatcher, he gave her ultimatum to cede or army will march in that afternoon. That was just right after She won the Falkland war. USA will get Chinese payback. The only way to stop this is to invoke friend and savior role. Unfortunately, USA is playing the ultimate sore loser card with a generous dose of bullying. Be worry. Be very worry.

> USA will get Chinese payback. The only way to stop this is to invoke friend and savior role. Unfortunately, USA is playing the ultimate sore loser card with a generous dose of bullying. Be worry. Be very worry.

Watching Trump try to use tariffs while China holds the cards has been actually hilarious.

Were we going to get payback for this latest economic war? Or for the last one? Or for supporting Taiwan in the 80s? Or for the Korean War? That’s the thing with this payback notion. It’s always justifiable. You just rewind to an appropriate time. No leader of the present can do anything about the fact that we killed two hundred thousand Chinese soldiers under Mao’s command in the Korean War.

There was never going to be a friend and savior role. Given that we had the Korean War there was always going to be this convenient thing to rewind to and blame.

Zhao Gao was always going to be conveniently rewritten to be a payback story. Even if he wasn’t described as a eunuch until later. That’s the thing with civilizations. They have these motifs that are post-hoc justified. If China wishes to threaten us in the future, and no doubt they will have the ability to fight us on even terms and perhaps even on uneven terms, they will simply seek an appropriate past.

After all, note that Zhao Gao’s story is one of supposed alignment with revealed misalignment afterwards. It’s not like he came out an enemy. He worked through subterfuge. Should we have decided to ally with China in the 2000s, doubtless when they turned on us they would easily tell the tale of revenge for the Korean War for which they pretended to be allies until at the last moment they revealed themselves as plotting revenge! Just like Zhao Gao ended the Qin dynasty you will say, proudly.

President Xi Jinping has referenced the Thucydides trap many times. To start with, dismissive of this idea, and now warnings that it is still avoidable. It won’t be revenge for the Korean War or for this latest economic escapade that will be the cause of any conflict with China. But when it comes, whatever story the Chinese public needs, the Chinese leadership can deliver. If revenge is what you want, you’ll get that story.

China is single-handedly propping up Iran, NK, and Russia financially. If you ahem removed the top 1000 leaders of the CCP tomorrow, those three countries wouldn’t be able to continue their population repression and the world would be an immeasurably better place. Iran killed, what, 20k of their own population earlier this year? Russia has lost 10x that this year alone. Blocking tech from China directly hampers their funding of these countries. Am I wrong?

Somewhat over-estimating the numbers, but even if your stats were accurate it wouldn’t change the critique that “the west” does the exact same thing.

This isn’t what-about-ism, this is simply acknowledging the realpolitik that there are great powers vying for control over the rest if the world through proxies. A game as old as civilisation itself.

We support Ukraine, they support Russia.

We support Israel, they support Iran.

We X, they Y.

Neither is more right or wrong than the other, and neither is the only bad actor.

You’re insane if you think supporting Russia is not “more wrong” than supporting Ukraine during a war Russia started to invade Ukraine.

What about Israel?

We support them but they don’t need us. Iran would crumble tomorrow without China. Also, Likud Israel might be gone after this year’s October election, whether we want it gone or not. Conversely, China acts as a virtual suzerain over Iran (and NK).

If you truly believe that Gaza would be entirely rubble as it is today without the last 2 decades of slavish US backing, I don't know what to tell you.

US is also best friends with the financiers of the horrific genocide in Sudan.

This isn't whataboutism because you're genuinely presenting it as if it's something very different from what the US has been up to for the last 60 years.

The slavish US backing is the same slavish backing we give to Egypt, both consequent on Camp David. It is very obvious - simple arithmetic - that Israel would have a much bigger and chearper arsenal if they traded arms with China, India, Russia etc. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just jewpilled.

Yeah, supporting Israel as we do is also insane. By that I mean delivering weapons so that they can continue their wars against their neighbors, their genocide, and their illegal, and extending occupation of the West Bank. Our politicians still don't find it in themselves to criticize Israel, after their actions have been recognized as Genocide.

Only a few countries in Europe have been more vocal about it, like Spain and I believe Ireland.

Especially, it hurts to see that German politicians are so uneducated, that they have learned nothing from history, and still act by the categories "Israel? Good!", "Against Israel? Evil!".

Didn't the US stop new aid since 2025? Sanctions against Russia sure (at least until they decided the spat with Iran was more important) but I feel like that moral high ground is little enough that proposing to "ahem remove"...

Actually on second thought even if the US is doing everything perfectly re Ukraine and Iran and whatever and general being the paragon of morality it really feels like jimbob45's proposal would be a speedrun of losing any possible moral high ground. The only thing that would do it faster is a first strike, and probably only by a couple of days or so. We're really discussing that as if "ahem removing" the leadership of a P5 (i.e. has enough nukes to end the world) country is a sane and normal thing to suggest?

That's not my meaning. There is a larger game being played. Sometimes one side is the aggressor in one particular local skirmish, sometimes the other.

Over the last few decades, the United States has regularly been the "unprovoked aggressor".

But again, the numbers aren't the point. The individual skirmishes aren't the point.

Neither side is "good" or "evil" like some child's cartoon. These are merely Great Powers poking and prodding each other, looking for advantage.

Besides which, I doubt China has sufficient influence over Iran to restrain them, considering the US "ahem removed" the all the people that could plausibly considered moderates. I wonder how reasonable China would feel if the US really went ahead and "ahem removed" a thousand of the top political leadership. My bet, well, it's certainly possible they are correct on the "wouldn't be able to continue their population repression" bit... considering we'll all be too busy dying of nuclear winter.

Imagine things happening other way around and China deciding to "ahem remove", not even a thousand, maybe a dozen people from the US government. Odds on that not ending in a nuclear exchange, anyone? I would take that bet at basically any odds, only I probably wouldn't be alive to spend it if I won.

If some nut job ordered assassination of 1000 PRC officials tomorrow, the world would be plunged into apocalyptic, possibly nuclear, war.

It's maybe the worst possible way to handle the situation even if you are a breathless US interventionist.

the USA is single handidly proping up a genocidal Israel and putting drunk TV hosts in charge of their department of war... and is at the tipping point of ethnic cleansing....

> (...) it's been a bit horrifying to watch the Western world consistently decide withholding tech from China and giving them no other option but develop their own tech, is a good idea.

This is a very ignorant and even cynical comment. You purposely omitted the fact that "the western world" was collaborating with China to the point where major corporations were developing tight partnerships, but only to see those partnerships being used to steal trade secrets about outright clone whole product lines.

To make matters worse, China is simulaneously demanding "the western world" transfers all tech to china while refusing to collaborate or even allow western companies to operate within their country.

Shall we talk about the extent that China has been targeting ASML industrial espionage?

https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2019/asml-disagr...

Let us talk about how much tech the fledgling United States stole from the Europeans, starting from the cotton mill all the way up to the Tizard Project. The US literally stole companies overnight at the start of WW2 (Merck).

As the preeminent superpower, the US had its turn. Now step aside and make way for China.

And you believe that no other western country on this planet is doing the same exact thing? Every country spies on its enemies, allies and trade partners.

That is just the name of the game. I copy you, you copy me and hopefully I can copy you more than you can copy me. Singling out China for something that everyone does is just disingenuous.

On the bright side, they'll basically reinvent the PARC era where actual innovation came because of the inherent limits of the technology at the time. The open weights models coming out are a sterling example.

The bloated american windbags in more ways than one need to be demonstrated again why sloth and bloat and craven "manifest destiny" is just negligence to intelligence and social benefits.

It doesn't make me upset that China seems able and determined to catch up on the litography technology - what else are they supposed to do?

What does make me upset is that Europe has the technology and seems unwilling or unable to get it's act together and make some chips. China seems to have managed this part too, only without access to the latest chip making technology!

The rulers of the West know their days are numbered because of how rapidly China is advancing. Rather than make Europe better, they’re currently looting it. It would not surprise me (though it always seems unlikely, doesn’t it?) that a war breaks out sooner or later, although at China’s scale they know how to quell uprisings the size of any European country without a big fuss. Besides, they’ve already taken over a lot of Europe. So as the saying goes, resistance is futile.

don't worry, im hearing that von der Leyen and all the EU politicians are hard at work and are about to shake hands and announce another package of funds that will disappear into the void in order to make the EU the "powerhouse" of AI, chips, datacenters, technology, jobs, space, everything.

just wait, this time it'll make a dent. lots of hand shaking and smiling for the cameras. it's gonna be a new era

Sadly the only thing that European leaders are really trying to copy from China is internet censorship and privacy eroding regulations...

All of this can be traced back to the 2018 blacklisting of ZTE, and the continued willful ignorance of China's capabilities, and of the history of industrialization and technological progress.

China is still far behind modern lithography. It took ASML almost 2 decades to get from immersion DUV (and EUV prototypes) to commercial EUV machines.

True but also catching up to an existing tech is a much different game than creating it from scratch. Hiring people who have the right knowledge can speed that up.

The core stuff is under heavy lock and key. I’m not sure China can hire people that know the whole process, let alone the bits and pieces they can’t easily figure out on their own. The tech seems to have been locked down by a few western countries, and it’s hard to find any holes in their secrecy.

I'm not sure how true this is but I've read in other threads that ASML employs many Chinese engineers, and also read other news that the Chinese state is paying engineers working abroad at companies like ASML alluring salaries to get them to work back home.

You can employ as many engineers as you want but if you compartilize them enough and separate key processes to a very small group of people (Dutch citizens or whatever, maybe military), you can actually protect the process as a whole.

It’s not like a nuclear bomb that even high school students can even figure out how to make without much help.

The thing is that an expert in the area does not need the detailed how-to guide/complete description of the process.

Few hints here and there can help to get over the key hurdles, with most other steps either a general knowledge for the experts, or analogues can be independently developed without too much trouble.

Yes, the result is not the same, but actually developing indigenous expertise is the key required component anyway,

China has a lot of bits and pieces of process but they are spending time to figure out how to put them together along with a few key locked up secrets that you just can’t get with smarts alone. They will definitely get there, but don’t be surprised if they come up with a very different solution because being derivative just wasn’t an option

Espionage

Nah, you watch too many movies, they openly hired former asml employees.

It's only a google away friend.

> https://dominotheory.com/taiwan-issues-first-national-securi...

This, these news organizations have no f'n clue. China this, China that, it's all part of the 10 billion China spends on b.s to feed the Americans that they are behind or they are useless and that they don't stand a chance....

China is on the verge of collapse walking the razors edge.

Yes. China is behind on some of the crucial technology that gives the West its advantage, but this framing that the country is on the verge of collapse is just not true.

Also recreating a know technology usually takes much less time even if you don't have access to the underlying tech.

Schrödinger's economy

https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/why-do-people-keep-predictin...

Does thediplomat.com also have articles on the historical depth of of the list of predictions that the USA will collapse? It is a far older and infinitely more pervasive phenomenon.

Is that so? I'd be delighted to review some examples.

I mean, it's possible that an economy, especially of a major nation, can be on the verge of collapse and that it can be pushing technical frontiers. It's even possible that pushing those frontiers can forestall or reverse the economic collapse.

There are certainly a lot of people who think the above applies to the US.

But isn't it easier to copy some existing approach than to create it from a green field? ASML tech is presumably highly protected, but China is also very good in spying, hacking etc.

Yes. But it's not as simple as just having access to ASML's ip. They have exclusive rights to all the components and inputs, which are also protected and are also hard to make.

It's a whole system that China needs to duplicate.

This stuff is really hard to copy. China basically had to put in all the cold era materials research along with getting up to speed on current tech, from scratch. They were/are always going to catch up because they have the resources to, but there are no shortcuts.

The patent system is very strong evidence that there are shortcuts. So many that we have laws designed to protect and incentivize version 1.

Sure, there’s some hard lessons along the way; but far, far, far fewer than figuring it out in the first place.

And this misplaced assumption about how China won’t be able to innovate when standing on the shoulders of giants (with you saying ‘are always going to catch up’) looks only at the last 100 years and forgets the millenia before it. The West is not magically superior.

There are just some things that China can’t access and they have to reinvent on their own. Like 50 years of intensive materials research that is locked away in a safe and access is heavily restricted. Yes, China could innovate by standing on the shoulders of giants if they had access to the giants, they simply don’t have access.

I struggle to imagine that all 50 years have been wholly blocked from all international research students. That seems highly implausible.

Edit: for a comparison, it took the Soviet Union 4 years to have their own Atom Bomb after the US dropped two.

Again, the Cold War and moon shots generated ALOT of data that the west keeps locked up very well. I don’t think we can really fathom today the resources they dumped into figuring things out, and how much we’ve been coasting on that work.

Are you intentionally invoking the same style of argument of Ancient Aliens and rejecting all public - that is, *in the open* work that thousands of scientists have done over the last 50 years and instead preferring to create a scenario where we invented everything 50 years ago and are slow-trickling it into the world?

Like, Independence Day style?

Sure, and spent most of it experimenting with something nobody knew would work in production or not, and needed a lots of breakthrough ideas that are now known as the machines exist.

OK, China will do it in 5 years then.

I would not be overestimating this achievement, but not underestimating either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. China had access to the latest EUV tech for some time already, so they had abilities to reverse-engineer that tech. Eventually, the verdict will be clear only after we see actual chips produced using these machine, and when we learn their real yield.

Basically game over for compute wars in ~5 years if PRC serious, PRC doesn't need EUV to win compute game. If they hammer DUV tools and commoditize semi (i.e. remove 50-80% margins along every step of supply chain) they will simply be able to sell chips at fraction price of west, even accounting for multi pattern inefficiencies. TCO may still swing leading edge favor depending on infra / energy price, but as far as compute race goes, PRC can hammer power, fabs, DCs all at much lower input costs. The bottleneck has always been semi tooling.

ASML dropped; it used to be the undisputed leader of immersion DUV

Interesting in so many ways that theinfo kept the company anon but Reuters exposed it (allegedly)

Aside: what we know for sure is that Chinese are catching up to Japanese in putting dad-style puns in their brands

https://www.hoshinocoffee.com/

do you mean like Xīn Kǎilái 新凯来 "new triumph" could also sound like 芯凯来 "chip triumph" ?

nvidia clone in next year or two?

btw photo on that article is actually intel at Oregon

Unpopular opinion:

if you do not want to pay $500 a month for Claude Max, maybe let China keep pushing engineering optimization. The U.S. and China should compete.

The US does not want to compete with China. There’s no profit in it when compared to the riches available from having a captive marketplace.

Doesn’t China heavily restrict competition in its domestic markets? Probably only North Korea is worse.

China is one of the most restrictive countries but expects full access to US market behaving like a US state or territory in its claims to US domestic markets lol.

Last time I checked, China is not a US province or territory but maybe that is the state of affairs China aspires to in the long term with Trump looking to add a new state.

American companies are banned the same reason TikTok and Huawei is banned in the US. Nobody wants spy apparatuses operating within their shore.

Also are you going to simply ignore the fact that Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China?

Look up when American companies got banned and when TikTok and Huawei got banned.

American companies have been banned decades earlier.

> Also are you going to simply ignore the fact that Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China?

Also, are you and the other commenter ignoring the fact, thousands to millions of companies from China sell in the US?

Temu and Shein are still free to sell forced labor lead-infused goods. Lenovo still works. So do millions of tiny Chinese brands on Amazon.

You ignored that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are completely banned in China. Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps are completely unavailable in mainland China

TikTok wasn't banned (but had to restructure) and RedNote operates without any changes.

> Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China

Yeah, and both companies manufacture heavily within China

> Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are completely banned in China. Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps are completely unavailable in mainland China

For very good reasons

Most of the time, the domestic market in China is indirectly controlled through political and social influence, not through policy. It's not a fair market at all.

How does this compare to EUV?

It's about 14x worse if you just look at the wavelength of light.

When China eventually catches up on conventional lithography, the goalposts will simply shift to silicon photonics and optical logic, a transition DARPA laid the publicly visible groundwork for decades ago through programs like POEM and PIPES while keeping the mature implementations strictly classified until needed.

Are these tippy top-secret Skunkworks Final Boss Wunderwaffen with you in the room right now?

More and more there seems to be some wishful thinking that the USA has another hidden generation of SR-71 or Stealth tech type surprises squirrelled away for a rainy day. Find this hard to believe when the best brains of the generation got hoovered up by hedge funds, click merchants, and now token slingers.

Is there anything to stop the Chinese doing a silicon photonics end run independent of cracking EUV at scale? Or is getting EUV right first on the critical path? This part is a genuine question.

There are a lot of very very very smart people working in defense. Gov doesn't pay the best but the benefits are unmatched.

afaik no one is working in defence anymore; now they are working in war

congress still hasn't approved the name change

Yeah, and Chinese (before that: Japanese) cars will always be crap.

Times change, believing in your never ending superiority is foolish.

Ultimately a win for the consumer, China does not tend to ban technology as a weapon

Let's not act like China doesn't use export controls for their geopolitical desires.

"China halts rare-earth exports to Japan after Japan detains a Chinese fishing-boat captain near disputed islands" [1].

"China suspends natural-sand exports to Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taipei" [2].

"China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the United States in retaliation for new U.S. semiconductor restrictions" [3].

"China restricts exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense companies in response to U.S. sanctions on Chinese firms" [4].

"China bans exports of dual-use goods that could strengthen Japan’s military following tensions over Taiwan" [5].

[1] [https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/revisiting-china-japan-rare-e...](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/revisiting-china-japan-rare-e...) [2] [https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/economic-sanction...](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/economic-sanction...) [3] [https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor...](https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor...) [4] [https://apnews.com/article/1aebe98718e127365859b0fb0b63d07b](https://apnews.com/article/1aebe98718e127365859b0fb0b63d07b) [5] [https://apnews.com/article/0ea90fa798771c9fb650422ca3e21e09](https://apnews.com/article/0ea90fa798771c9fb650422ca3e21e09)

Who started it?

> Ultimately a win for the consumer, China does not tend to ban technology as a weapon

Doesn't have to, China will just subsidize their businesses, sometimes at a substantial loss, for as long as it takes to bankrupt the international competitors. So yeah, if by that you mean "they end up unemployed and in overall economic pain, but for a short time some stuff was abnormally cheap" then yes, "it's a win for the consumers"

Nobody is stopping the western countries of doing the same exact thing with their own industries. As a matter of fact, the EU and the US are subsiding a lot of their own companies or even entire sectors of their economy (agriculture/arms/space/IT... the list goes on) already so why is it a problem if China does it?

You can't complain about something that literally every single country on this planet is doing and then somehow be angry because China does it as well. Rules for thee not for me and all that.

The real difference between what China does and what the western countries are doing is that China jump starts some industries with heavy subsidies and then gives them time to catch up to international standards and finally turns off the money tap and it forces these companies to export their production outside of China and makes them ultra competitive which is clearly a win for the consumers.

That is exactly how it played out with EVs today. Compare that to the auto industry in the EU which has relied on the same state support for the last decades and instead of using this support to innovate and compete they simply squandered their advance in these industries and find themselves on the back-foot thinking that they could just keep doing the same thing and that everything will work out somehow.

Who made the EVs cheaper today? China by competing heavily while the rest of the world was busy milking as much cash as possible from their customers. What about solar panels, batteries, wind turbines? China, China and China again.

Because the tools are somewhat comparable, you seem to have been tricked into conflating "protectionism" (which has some stabilising virtues, especially in the area of agriculture, arms, heavy industries, resources extraction) and "dumping" (which is an aggressive act). There is also something to be said about the scale of it. And of the validity of a world view where "every trick is allowed, everything is for grabs, and let the biggest be the winner, and the winner take it all".

when those tricks benefit the average person in the end whats wrong with them?

subsidy wars give you extra manufacturing capacity that stays there even if the market collapses. economists call it overbuilding like its something wrong but i think "investment above market level" is a lot more accurate.

if everyone price dumps equally, nobody wins and the fight can go on forever. that fight is good for consumers (lower prices), good for producers (higher demand with the same margins), neutral for states and very bad for commercial lenders who deserve it because their business is pure rent extraction. and it will push the industry forward in a permanent way through higher R&D investment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com