This reminds me. I have an anecdote from my 90-something year old uncle who coordinated and managed construction efforts for the power grid in a post-WWII socia

This reminds me. I have an anecdote from my 90-something year old uncle who coordinated and managed construction efforts for the power grid in a post-WWII socialist-bloc country between 1940-1990. At first they relied on the blueprints left behind by Germany, and then they sourced their power generators and components from the USSR. But within several decades, it became clear that the USSR stuff is just bad. Like straight up unreliable and faulty bad. So the question became about whether to build their own, which the engineers were very confident they could do. Although it seemed feasible in principle, after many years of failures it just turned out that manufacturing these things was way too difficult to do reliably domestically. They had underestimated the entire intellectual investment necessary. Buying from the West, from manufacturers with decades of experience became the only option. And this was a long time before the iron curtain even started to collapse. And this was a process managed by socialist/communist loyalists. They were buying tech from the West while still projecting an image of strength and control. Regimes trying to copy something strongly reminds me of that anecdote. They usually manage to waste a lot of resources only just barely catching up, copying, and then they still end up buying the stuff that works from the companies that have the decades and the experience doing it. Making this chip tech sounds orders of magnitude more complex. Reading the article I only think about what a major fumble it was geo-strategically that the people with good ideas went to Taiwan.