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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

China is gated by not having EUV machine access. They're also bottlenecked by ASML's DUV machine production like everyone else. There are already talks of banning China from even purchasing DUV machines from ASML.

So until China solves the ASML problem, there won't be any flooding.

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>until China solves the ASML problem

Which they are in progress on: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manh...

Yes, but we don't know how well they work or what nm can they print or how machines they can make.

They've overcome every hurdle to go from nothing to having working machines, so all these questions are presumably a matter of how fast they will improve and ramp up production (initially 5 this year, 20 next year), not whether they will.

China have been really squeezing all they can out of DUV machines, but I'm not sure how much node size really matters for AI competition - more of a cost issue (more chips/power for same FLOPs) than anything, and TSMC & NVIDIA's healthy profit margins need to be considered too.

I'm well aware of how good China is at manufacturing. However, DUV/EUV machine manufacturing is unproven.

What is the timeline like? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

They already have working machines, and are slated to ship the first 5 early production ones right about now (before the end of 2026), and are projecting 20 for next year.

Small numbers perhaps, but this is happening right now.

What will the numbers be in 5-10 years time? Who knows, but ASML took about 5 years to go from 20/yr to 100+/yr.

Of course politically the world may well be quite different in 5 years time, as may be the AI market.

Yes, 5 years seems like an eternity in AI world.

We also don't know how small of nm chips they can manufacture. If it's 20nm, it's practically useless for advanced AI chips.

> There are already talks of banning China from even purchasing DUV machines from ASML

A bit late for that now that they are moving into early production with their own.

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