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How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
- gnarlouse 10mo agoHopefully this doesn’t stoke a third and final world war.
- Animats 10mo agoA better title would be "New EUV light source built in Shenzhen". Light source said to be working, not fabbing chips yet. Few technical details in the Reuters article.
- nullhole 10mo agoThey built the project, the bomb hasn't gone boom yet though.
- Animats 10mo agoThere's a lot of machinery for moving the wafers around precisely in vacuum. But that's ordinary engineering, although the speeds at which ASML moves wafers are impressive.
- jiggawatts 10mo agoThe light source is the “easy” bit. The mirrors, masks, and the rest of the machine are all individually as difficult if not more so. The wafers have to be positioned to nanometer accuracy repeatedly and at high speed! It’s hard to believe that’s even possible, let alone commercially viable.
- restalis 10mo agoManaging the light source, specifically the 13.5nm length on the wave spectrum, that gets generated from overheated tin plasma, is in fact the most challenging part of the machine. Here "managing" includes the process of hitting a rightly sized tin droplet with lasers at the right angles, and all the rest of the complicated fluid math necessary to get the most of that precious lighting moment, as well as the proper handling of that spark event's after-effects, of course. As opposed to the rest of the machine parts (like directing the EUV light to the reticle through those mirrors you mention), the light generation part is dynamic, very easily to get wrong, and very costly to iterate on.
- darkamaul 10mo agoI'd argue ASML's moat isn't the machine itself but the ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, decades of supplier relationships, institutional knowledge. This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
- markus_zhang 10mo agoI agree. They have a long way to go. There is also something happening in Shanghai but I don’t know the progression.
- mk89 10mo agoThey are "extracting" optical devices from other machines, imagine how desperate they are for this "machine". As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss. Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
- Herring 10mo agoI bet the ex employee doesn't even have to be Chinese. I'm not, but get me FAANG-level salaries and decent working hours I'll 你好 all you want.
- rnewme 10mo ago我们不会大声说这种话。
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- _zagj 10mo ago> I bet the ex employee doesn't even have to be Chinese. That bit struck me as naive, given the instances of Americans who aren't Chinese nationals, or even ethnically Chinese at all, caught committing actual espionage on behalf of China.
- Aldo_MX 10mo agoThis article is more skeptical: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/china-may-have-reverse-engineered-euv-lithography-tool-in-covert-lab-report-claims-employees-given-fake-ids-to-avoid-secret-project-being-detected-prototypes-expected-in-2028 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...
- culi 10mo agoI've read both articles and they say basically the exact same information. Only the tone of this article is a little more skeptical. It also just includes less context/information in general than the featured article
- ReptileMan 10mo agoThe "problem" with China is that they move from "the amazing thing about a dog playing the piano is not that it plays it badly, but that it plays it all" to Franz Liszt very fast.
- pdude444 10mo agoarchive link??
- madars 10mo agoIt's quite easy to do it yourself - just open archive.is and paste the original URL in. https://archive.is/tKZmn https://archive.is/tKZmn FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819
- Ancalagon 10mo agoSeems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.
- jakeinspace 10mo agoIf China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.
- noosphr 10mo agoAt this point I'm willing to wave around the little red book for a 1TB of ram. I don't have that many kidneys left to buy gpus, ram and ssd at the prices they are now, let alone the prices next year.
- treyd 10mo agoThis would be more in-line with their strategy in other areas. Quietly massively improve technical capability and then utterly out-compete international competitors. They did this with solar, multicopters, are in progress with doing this with TVs, nuclear power, etc. War is expensive and destructive, it's easier and nicer to just negate the economic relevance of your opponents if you have the time and resources to do it (which they do).
- mywittyname 10mo agoChina is also doing this with weapons. It's just a little more difficult normal people to see the results because people can't get a Dongfeng 2x series rocket from Ali Express. Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.
- simmerup 10mo ago
- bgwalter 10mo agoWe learn that before 2023 EUV lithography was worthless. "AI" is the only reason why China would want this technology! EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?
- georgeburdell 10mo agoThe knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.
- kccqzy 10mo agoSanctioning won’t do anything. These former ASML employees know that their professional careers in the western world are finished. I bet they know when they are signing that they are going to stay in China or countries friendly with China for the rest of their lives.
- integralid 10mo ago>for the rest of their lives You overestimate length of the western outrage. Anyway what's to sanction? Almost no country recognizes Taiwan. Diplomatically they changed one job in China to another
- pedroma 10mo agoA good benchmark would be how long the west remains mad at Russia for invading Ukraine.
- mywittyname 10mo agoWho is "the west" in your eyes? I personally know plenty of people in the USA who are openly cheering for Russia in the conflict. So I don't think we could say that "the west" is mad at Russia. Certain people in western countries are, but plenty are quite happy with Russia and wish them well in their endeavors.
- xwindowsorg 10mo agoCheering for the "West" means if West wins then please expect 1 million Iraqis (replace Iraq by any other country) dead just because.
- pxc 10mo agoIt seems extremely dishonest to frame the project of improving computer chip manufacturing to the development of weapons of mass destruction— weapons that went on to be used against civilians. Sensationalist and propagandistic framing for what is otherwise an interesting article.
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoThe term 'Manhattan Project' is a common and widely used metaphor for R&D programs with effectively unlimited resources applied to them. The actual Manhattan Project is simply a very famous exemplar of such a program. Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
- pxc 10mo agoWhen referring to the efforts nation-states, I'd be very interested to hear how often such metaphorical usage is used to describe the work of adversarial vs. friendly countries. I would be shocked if it's as often (in the Anglophone press) used to describe the work of US-aligned countries as it is that of US-adversarial countries.
- random9749832 10mo agoThis is literally by the country that suffered the most from it.
- ptx 10mo agoWell, the description is attributed to "two people with knowledge of the project" of unclear national origin.
- theautist 10mo agoIt's not just about the use of the term "Manhattan Project". It's about the framing and wording of the article. There is literally an image of a PRC soldier in front of a rocket in the article.
- catigula 10mo ago> It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUVs) This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation? Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.
- mk89 10mo ago> China’s prototype lags behind ASML’s machines largely because researchers have struggled to obtain optical systems such as those from Germany’s Carl Zeiss, one of ASML’s key suppliers, the two people said. So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need. They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.
- solid_fuel 10mo agoWith Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-supply-by-up-to-40-in-2026-due-to-memory-shortages https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
- apercu 10mo agoIf that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable. We will also see talent pipeline erosion. Just further Western industrial policy failure.
- standardUser 10mo agoNon-verifiable by what standards?
- apercu 10mo agoModern GPU's often have on device firmware, secure boot chains, microcontrollers, etc. If you don't control silicon design, firmware signing and update pipelines you can't meaningfully attest to what the advice is doing.
- Yoric 10mo agoBut for most of us, that's already the case, isn't it?
- XorNot 10mo agoFor the average paranoid person who is wasting their life on it, sure But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world. Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and designers in production facilities is extremely valuable.
- nitwit005 10mo agoA "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist. If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts: > The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype
- dwroberts 10mo agoThey are acquiring parts to reverse engineer them and build their own
- nitwit005 10mo ago> setting a goal of producing working chips on the prototype by 2028 They might be, but if they plan on getting a factory running in 3 years, they're presumably planning on using what they purchased.
- exceptione 10mo ago+ industrial espionage to be able to reverse engineer it at all.
- ux266478 10mo agoIf someone likes you, trade secrets flow like wine. That's basic humanity. It's not unique to China, though the relationships involved are a little bit different. It's not a bad thing either, we all live in the same society.
- wood_spirit 10mo agoA “manhattan project” can just mean a massive secret scientific war project? Seems apt.
- agumonkey 10mo agoand a critical nation scale ambition
- alexgotoi 10mo ago[flagged]
- pstuart 10mo agoChina seems to be doing well on supply chain integration (with the exception of the trust part). Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.
- maxglute 10mo agoMost of that entire network is easy to replicate, as in it's not technically hard, the hard part is validation, no one in PRC wants to use unproven PRC inputs if risk is 100m wafer run goes to trash. Hence PRC now basically insuring domestic fabs on risk runs using domestic inputs, which are being validated on full scale production, instead of taking 5 years to verify, it'll take 2. Export controls help this, i.e. domestic resist basically required now after JP export controls. The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.
- MassEffect5784 10mo agoI can't wait for China to put its full heft in manufacturing advanced graphics cards, fast storage and much more. We need competition.
- lossolo 10mo agoAlso interesting huge project: China is building a $116 billion dam which, according to Bloomberg, is expected to generate 70 GW, just to compare: UK whole capacity (de-rated) is around 70 GW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAwJESmfy10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAwJESmfy10
- hermitcrab 10mo agoChinese dam projects have not always gone well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- DoctorOetker 10mo agointensive vs extensive quantities
- nulld3v 10mo agoThe current largest hydroelectric dam in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China. It can generate 22.5GW (40% more power than the dam in 2nd place, which is also Chinese). Since Jan 2024, China has on average constructed 23GW of new solar power every month. So China has effectively been adding a "world's largest dam" worth of solar power, every single month for the last 24 months.
- jmyeet 10mo agoIn 1945 as World War 2 wrapped up and the Cold War started, many in the US believed that it would take the Soviet Union 20+ years to build the atomic bomb. It took 4 years. There were several reasons for this. It became a national security interest, there were leaks to the USSR by people who thought the US shouldn't have a monopoly on the bomb and Americans in general viewed the Soviets as backward farmers. I see the same thing with China. It's not so much espionage now (although there might be that) but China instead will just hire people with the right knowledge, so former employees of ASML, Nvidia, TSMC, etc. I've been saying for awhile that China won't tolerate the export ban on ASML's best lithography machines and NVidia's best chips. It's a national security issue. And China is the one country on Earth I have faith can dedicate itself to a long term goal. And yet I got the same reaction. "The Chinese will never catch up", etc. Reports have been comiung out that Huawei has started developing and using their own 7nm chips. Weirdly, the US created this problem. By restricting exports of chips to China, Chinese manufacturers had no choice but to develop their own chips. Had China been flooded with NVidia chips, there would be far less market opportunity. The American economy is essentially a bet on an AI future now. Were it not for like 7 tech companies, we'd be in a technical recession. I also believe that bubble is going to burst. But the economy as a whole pretty much now requires US dominance of an AI future and I think a lot of people are in for a rude shock as China completely disrupts that. China hasn't caught up yet. There are still many steps in the supply chain and chip design as a whole but making their own chips at sub-7nm is a massive step in that direction.
- scotty79 10mo agoIt's kind of nasty that a fresh society of capable people has the drive to achieve technological excellence and the incumbents do whatever they can to delay this, even though it's inevitable and there's a lot to gain by empowering them. All in the name of "they are not us". World has gained so much from modern Chinese industrial revolution. Why suddenly everyone got cold feet? Nobody was stopping Germany or Japan on their way up even though they were literal former enemies with history of brutal warfare. China never done anything even comparable to others.
- christophilus 10mo agoI mean, if we’re going to make that comparison, China today looks much more like pre-war Germany and Japan— set on expansion. That’s pretty clearly what the anti-China crowd is worried about. Tibet, Taiwan, Philippine islands, ever expanding naval bases, aggressive displays of power around Australia, prison camps and sterilization programs, and so forth.
- scotty79 10mo agoHow does it compare to the last 50-70 years of US actions? Even if all narratives are true and significant, China could still massively benefit the world same way US did despite its vast shortcomings.
- olalonde 10mo agoChina has never had expansionist ambitions. On the contrary, modern Chinese foreign policy is explicitly grounded in non-interventionism and respect for sovereignty (the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence). Xinjiang, Tibet and, per Beijing, Taiwan, are internal matters. The "Philippine islands" have been claimed by multiple states long before the PRC existed.
- Invictus0 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
- notepad0x90 10mo agoGood for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ). Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition. I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.
- standardUser 10mo agoThe more China advances domestically, especially in this area, the less it has to gain from invading Taiwan. China is getting to the point where the conquest is finally doable (rapidly advancing and massive military, plus a weak US president), but the potential gains are diminishing year to year. I'd speculate that if they don't invade during Trump's term, they never will, and will pursue a different course down the road. China is nothing if not patient.
- wahern 10mo agoThe motivation to invade Taiwan is rooted in the PRC's political and historical narrative about it's legitimacy and purpose, a narrative internalized by most Chinese, including especially the military. It's in a sense existential, not economic or realpolitik, and I don't see that motivation diminishing anytime soon. If anything it's growing stronger, as evidenced by the suppression in Hong Kong, which made zero sense without reference to how Chinese political institutions sustain themselves. The risk of an invasion sparking a conflict with the US is primarily what held them back, and at best economic and foreign strategic pain only secondarily, but all those risks diminish by the day, leaving China's raw existential motivation unchecked.
- spaceman_2020 10mo agoThe biggest victory for CCP will be Taiwan willingly joining PRC. Nothing else will be a better testament to the CCP model Reunification with the mainland isn’t a completely unpopular idea in Taiwan. The economic ties are already extremely deep (largest trading partner by far).
- hyruo 10mo agoThis is undoubtedly a good news story, and the most wonderful part is that the article mentions that 14 organizations declined to comment on the matter.
- makeitdouble 10mo agoThe "Manhattan Project" part is that the research lab was confidential...which doesn't seem that unusual for a high profile research lab, but that aside. Comparing China's public efforts to build a computer chips industry to the US effort to nuke Japan is kinda wild. Outside of the bait part, the piece coming from Japan Times makes it that much spicier.
- dluan 10mo agoIt's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders. You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
- bad_haircut72 10mo agoI also cant understand people being in denial about, or claiming other imagined moats or whatever. They're whipping the pants of us right now industrially, if the west has any advantages left its that we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial. Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
- scrlk 10mo agoOneshotted by refusing to update priors from 1990s-era 'End of History' thinking.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- this_user 10mo agoThe west is still underestimating China. There is a great anecdote, I think it's from the book 'Apple in China', about their engineers visiting a Chinese production plant. Some changes needed to be made to the place. The Apple people estimated that that would take two weeks. They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
- nebula8804 10mo agoI often wonder what is it that's driving the Chinese to work themselves to death to get this stuff done? Surely there must be some limit. I guess we can see it in the low birth rates, the youth unemployment, and I guess the desire to just survive because there's just so many people there. But still, I just don't get how Chinese just keep going and going. What is their end goal on a person to person level? Are they just going to keep killing themselves for the rest of their lives? What happened to the lie flat movement?
- zelphirkalt 10mo agoIs "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
- zoklet-enjoyer 10mo agoWhen I hear Manhattan Project, I don't think about the outcome. I think about the massive amount of effort for a singular goal that might not even be possible.
- stupidhooper 10mo agoWhy is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoIt’s really not. It just is short hand for a government deciding that something really important is worth throwing a lot of resources at. I’ve heard it used to describe plenty of things western governments do too.
- xwindowsorg 10mo agoWhy not Moonshot projects? like Google X.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoAlso good.
- stupidhooper 10mo agoYou think the headline isn’t a violent superlative?
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoNo, it isn’t. The media uses that term to describe any big strategic R&D project. Anyone that reads English language media would know this.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoThat’s not how it’s used, no. It’s also not a superlative, it’s a metaphor. Superlative would be something like “biggest” or “best”.
- jandrewrogers 10mo ago“Manhattan Project” is an ubiquitous metaphor that has nothing to do with nukes or weapons. The media describes everything from climate research to AI this way. Companies often refer to their own strategic internal projects as a “Manhattan Project”.
- amluto 10mo agoIf I were running this show, I would have a second concurrent project as a hedge and as a chance of leapfrogging the West: trying to make free electron laser lithography work. Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms. So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c
- jpgvm 10mo agoYeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks. The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc. It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first. This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc. However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
- parineum 10mo ago> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead. I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
- neilv 10mo agoOf course China will probably catch up, and surpass, in this and most things that it sets its mind to. Instead of the US recently veering into batpoop-insane policy, the US should be focused on promoting a peaceful and equitable world that it would like to live in when it's not top dog.
- shevy-java 10mo agoAnd the prices go up ... They really need to pay us all compensation money. And I mean literally EVERY single company that has been responsible for driving the RAM prices up. Free market my ... ...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- yanhangyhy 10mo agoDomestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything. There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent projects were quite serious, which undermined the Chinese government’s confidence in these efforts. A few years ago, there was even a so-called “transparent computing” scam project that was awarded a national-level prize. Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process. In fact, aside from high-end chips, China already dominates the mid- and low-end chip segments.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agoI wonder how much scam there is on US side...
- yanhangyhy 10mo agoTo be honest, maybe only Americans themselves really understand it. Our understanding of them is that they have poured vast amounts of money into areas outside of technology.
- vasco 10mo ago> since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. This implies copying what someone else did. Rather than inventing something new. I know it's not what you meant but if it wasn't made by God it's because it's already made by someone else. The sentence says to me more about copying than some relentless pursuit. The people who invented the thing to copy, those were more relentless presumably. And then again the Chinese invented plenty over the years. These generalizations are bit meh.
- yosefk 10mo agoThe Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying
- TheRoque 10mo agoLove how people (americans) are always framing it "China vs the west" or "Russia vs the West" when in reality it's just China vs the US. It's convenient and makes people think that the whole western world is allied and agrees with the US. While it's true in theory, the reality is much more nuanced than this.
- magic_hamster 10mo agoChina, Russia, Iran, have shared interests and are known to help each other out, in some cases finding ways to go around sanctions. It's wrong to look at it as one country "vs the west". It's two sets of countries. Even if you don't fully agree with the US, a western country will have much more disagreement with countries from the other group.
- Longlius 10mo agoASML is a Dutch company.
- charintstr 10mo agoChina has interests at direct odds to Europe like assisting the Russians to victory in Ukraine. It also has interest to dump exports onto European markets. Regardless of whether you agree with the US, China is going to be looking out only for itself from now on.
- sharas- 10mo ago"the people said"
- chenzhekl 10mo agoI am kind of skeptical about the report, as there are almost no details revealed. Everyone knows that China wants to build its own semeconductor manufacturing devices. The question is how close it is to be used in real production. The report just throws out a very vague number, maybe ~2030, which I can give the same guess, too.
- beAbU 10mo ago2030 is around the corner though.
- letmetweakit 10mo agoSome competition for Nvidia is good, might drive down prices. One can only hope.
- Dave_Wishengrad 10mo ago[dead]
- animistically 10mo agoComplex systems evolve by learning. They grow more complex. Same for the brain as for organizations and societies. China is a redistribute centralist State. It has to be: a narrow coastal region is hyper wealthy and to maintain territorial integrity it requires a strong government to tax there and spend elsewhere. Hence the infrastructure and construction boom. The high debt is a feature of the system, these are State backed enterprises that live on subsidy. The upshot is this limits complexity. ASML is in NL for a reason. NL is a feature of Western Europe decentralization. Arguably, Europe conquered the world because its internal fragmentation fostered a rapid gain in complexity. The US has cemented this into its own constitution and political culture. All talks about "Europe innovation" and "China catching up" are moot. Europe became a colony of the US post WWII and the integration needed to foster internal peace capped its capacity to grow complex. The US is now the most complex society on Earth and no other region can cope with that much complexity on that scale. Both Russia and China are held together by trading complexity off centrality.
- christkv 10mo agoReverse-engineered is a nice way of writing stole.
- Havoc 10mo agoIt was kinda inevitable. A country with technical ability and ambition like China was never going to go "Oh only one company in netherlands can do it? Damn I guess we're snookered then".
- sapphirebreeze 10mo ago[dead]
- SideburnsOfDoom 10mo agoAre these necessary "AI Chips", not just "Chips"? If - hear me out - this whole LLM AI thing turns out be be overhyped, won't this capability be useful for a lot of other things , from consumer electronics to combat drones. e.g. Useful in the growing Chinese EV sector. And lessening dependence on chips made in Taiwan seems strategic. It seems broader than a bet on "AI" specifically. A more strategic move. From the article, first paragraph: > cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance.
- doe88 10mo agoI have no sympathy towards China, but it is dumb and arrogant to think that such a big and powerful country with enough time and determination won't be able to achieve this goal. They have the industry, the manpower, the education system, this is only a question of time now.
- stackedinserter 10mo agoWestern strength is not tech that we have today, but the velocity we're moving forward. Any tech can be and will be stolen, copied and improved, the only way to remain ahead is to run faster.
- matt3210 10mo agoCorrection: sanctions worked and now they’re building better chips than us
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoNever forget the continual parade of "experts" when the chip ban was being promoted who all said in unison: "China is 20 years behind" Horribly dishonest. But they all talked in lockstep: lawmakers + "experts".
- mmmBacon 10mo agoSure, by the time China clones this generation of tin droplet ASML EUV machines at production scale, the market will have shifted to free-electron lasers.
- assemblyman 10mo agoI feel the American media and general public has gotten psyched by the recent announcements coming from China. This might be new weapons or Deepseek or conveniences in the cities. I wish the Chinese people all the best and sincerely hope they prosper. At the same time, I really wish Americans would get out of this panic mode. You answered several challenges over the last 250 years. Some were existential threats. America generally lays out its problems for everyone to see. Americans tend to be extremely self-critical. This is often misconstrued by some to be signs of weakness. Anyone who believes this is, in my opinion, delusional. As an aside, there are some comments about the "Chinese way of thinking" and the "American way of thinking". I generally think these discussions veer off into notions of cultural superiority. That, also in my opinion, is the mark of weak minds. The fact is once something is shown to be possible, it is exponentially easier to duplicate and improve it. America did this with German technology, China did it with American technology and I am sure countries like India are going to quickly get there too (I am not suggesting the Germans didn't learn from others themselves). This sets a firm base for iterative improvements. To riff off another comment, China's progress wasn't done by God. America will learn and adopt what's valuable and discard what's not. If I have learned anything about Americans (of all backgrounds), they don't shy away from a challenge. For all its faults, I still personally will root for a society based on something like the American constitution.
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