The answer is, of course, yes. What is there to stop them? Sure, it's difficult -- but where there's a will, and where the resources of China are involved, there is most assuredly a way.
I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash. Now I don't think I'd buy a non-Chinese new car or cellphone, lol.
The usual game plan of getting the technology they want to copy by offering cheap and highly skilled Chinese labour and access to the Chinese market by building the machines there is not available to them, so the likelihood is this will take longer and be more difficult than other implementations. There's hundreds of other technologies needed other than the lasers and the mirrors and the software and the experience running these machines at scale. I think to make more than a handful of GPUs they will be behind for at least 5 years.
This doesn't mean they will always be behind though.
If I was ASML I would have an AI generated honeypot of techniques that are plausible but incorrect for China to go after on this and make sure you get hacked by them.
So are modern Western cars - and arguably also phones.
If I'm forced to drive in a bug-riddled impossible-to-repair privacy-invading spaceship either way, why would I go for the overpriced outdated Western one rather than the affordable innovative Chinese one?
I would prefer a boring 2000s car with an electric drivetrain, but it's not like anyone is making them...
About privacy invasion, China is far from being the most evil.
Look at iPhone, outdated hardware, restricted, unauditable privacy and shitty software (especially starting iOS 26).
The main reason to stay there is... vendor lock-in / integration lock-in (AirPods or watches or Macbook).
In comparison, the irony is that China offers the freedom (like with Qwen).
On these supposedly evil Chinese devices (phones, headphones, watches, etc), you have an open platform with great hardware, that you can modify as much as you want, and the only people who restrict you is... Google (making sure you cannot root without losing to important apps, so technically you can root, but practically you can't).
All the claims about "China = bad hardware and bad software" were true 20 years ago, but this is not the case anymore.
Have had two Xiaomi phones in a row, I don't see the second rate.
My in law has a BYD Seagull, fail to see how it lags compared to similarly priced cars.
Chinese cars are incredibly popular in Europe, because they are better cars at the same price tag, even the more expensive ones.
I think it's asinine to think their high end manufacturing is crap, keeps us non competitive, let alone ignoring most of our stuff or large parts of it already comes from China.
And it has nothing to do with wages, modern high end manufacturing is highly automated and skilled engineers are as expensive as in southern or central Europe.
It has recently been reporting that China is cutting back foreign-language programmes in universities because AI translation is seen as the way of the future. So, in their view everyone will soon be reading science textbooks, whether of Chinese provenance or not, in any language.
They're already capable to build microprocessors completely in-house. This is precisely the cutting edge we're talking about.
This matters for AI datacenters in particular, if they want to be autonomous in building them they need to be able to build advanced microprocessors locally.
Despite rumours to the contrary the world does need things that aren't useful for modern AI codebases still, I'd really appreciate it right now if China could get some fabs going that just manufactured RAM, storage, and maybe a selection of chips that the big ones have given up on because its more profitable to endlessly churn out GPUs and NPUs.
Constant blaming and framing others of stealing. State support, unfair practices etc is not gonna help you become successful. China is now part of the game. You better work with them.
>The answer is, of course, yes. I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash.
No, not in this case. Becoming a leader in commodity white goods like a phones and cars is a different beast than EUV machines. The challenges are not even remotely comparable.
China doesn't have a Zeiss, it doesn't have an ASM, it doesn't have a Cymer, it doesn't have a Trumpf, and it doesn't have a dozen other domestic competitors to western suppliers of critical parts that make an EUV machine.
They have more than 1 billion people that are getting more and more educated, they have the capital and will to invest in it, they will get there eventually.
The "moat" we're talking about with private companies is that it's very hard for competitors to get enough funding to compete, and private investors are unwilling to invest in a company that will compete with a big established player. That's completely different when a state has a strategy and decides to invest to achieve a goal.
The comparison with cars and cellphones falls short for ASML machines. The former categories involved western companies transferring IP to Chinese counterparts.
So far, the Chinese have succeeded in stealing IP from ASML, but this is complexity in its own category. Also, the whole supply chain is part of the solution. That is a lot to copy.
But I agree that, given enough time, China should be able to. But Saab en Tesla handing over IP themselves, and phone makers letting China produce and assemble phones (maybe not as extensive these days anymore) is something different.
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.
Any nation state can build pretty much anything (albeit over a varying time period), because at the State Level the budgets can be billions, no commercial pressure and also immunity from prosecution (e.g. a Chinese spy caught would be traded for something or another and returned home and state authorised hackers based in China won't get extradited).
The only thing to stop them is the will of more powerful states.
If you take Iran as an example, they would have possessed Nuclear weapons long ago if it wasn't for USA/Israel as Iran as a state will throw everything at it.
p.s. And that's a very detailed and well laid out visual article above usual broadsheet standards.
The question is "can anyone". Makes you wonder why the USA hasn't built one? Maybe the latest technology required some rare discovery. Just like nobody can replicate the taste of Coca Cola, maybe there some tiny detail that they discovered by experimenting.
It doesn't help that Coca-Cola has privileged access to decocainized flavor extract, from there, others are guaranteed to struggle to get access to one ingredient.
The main flabbergasting stuff about Coca-Cola is the fact that they choose to use HFCS in some countries, and sugar in others, and this is due to... protectionism again that artificially skews competition like for electronics.
They basically (almost) did. In 2013 ASML bought US Cymer(the maker of EUV light sources) and in 2001 ASML acquired the US-based lithography equipment manufacturer Silicon Valley Group (SVG) after it had encountered liquidity issues.
Basically, the US had everything needed, the EUV light sources and lithography machines, just spread over different companies facing financial issues, so ASML came at the right moment and bought them all and integrated into their own business.
Just because ASML is based in NL doesn't mean all of its EUV secret sauce IP is domestically Dutch. Most of it comes from the US, which is why the US government maintains such a high influence of ASML's trade restrictions.
Humanity has been able to land stuff on the Moon for 60 years. It's not easy, but not particularly cutting edge as well. A modern EUV machine is much more complicated
ASML literally makes the most complex machines on Earth. Sure rockets are powerful and they help us reach outer space ... yet they need computers to do so. Computers in turn are made with lithography machines and the SOTA is ASML.
Also ASML is not alone. In fact ASML can not exists without its partners, first and foremost American Department of Energy but also s IMEC in Belgium and Zeiss in Germany. Those are all SOTA in either R&D or production. They are not "some of the best" they are literally the best in their very complex expertise. In fact they have to collaborate reach such level.
... and yet, it's "just" that. There is nothing magical about ASML. Yes it might be practically impossible because of IP, economics, etc but still China (or anyone else) can definitely pour a lot of resources to try and make significant process. Will the result be competitive though in light of the moat ASML has, in particular partnerships, that is hard to imagine.
PS edit : I did like Chris Miller's "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" and FWIW did have a former colleague working at ASML and been invited to IMEC events.
The US is ran by a moronic kleptocracy of conmen and number-go-up techbros that give precisely zero shits about human rights and improving life for the average citizen.
There is no way to defend the moral or political superiority of the west anymore. And who needs to worry about foreign intervention destabilizing internal affairs when we let the extremists, the populists do that for us?
At least if China pulls this off we might get some semi-affordable RAM and SSDs.
China IS building it's own chip foundrys and lithographic machines that ARE producing chips that ARE closing the gap towards parity with the best western (ASML) companys.
The question is can they do that, this year, or next?
Yes and that will be great. More competition = more choice = less political risk = great.
Protectionism policies are blocking low prices (what about tariffs ? what about monopolies ?) and are benefiting only the ones holding the knowledge and factories at the detriment of the rest of humanity.
Can't wait for ASML / TSMC / Zeiss equivalents so we can have access to memory sticks and GPUs / AI accelerators to run Qwen Super-Large distilled on Claude Zulu model, GTA VIII or whatever will come at that time.
I think what is crazy here is that the USA can block a Dutch company from selling their products. Don't get me wrong, this would have made sense in the world 15 years ago, but today? We all know that China plays dirty, but all those US made LLM's sure seem to know an awful lot about things in IP protected content.
Though to be fair, I think everyone knew that China was always going to have their 100% domestic chip manufacturing supply chain. I'd argue that the blocks were mainly a delaying tactic by the USA oligarchy. Simply blocking ASML from doing business with China would in itself motivate China to move faster, but I guess the decision makers and their advisors calculated that it would be slower than letting China buy the machinery and reverse engineer it.
Of course that didn't really work out. The only reason the media is picking up on these stories is that China, did, get their hands on the machinery, but then... of course they did.
asml will be profitable even after china catches up with their current tech. its not a silicon valley type company that wants a monopoly. if anything most of their engineers secretly want china to compete so they can push each other to do more advanced research.
I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash. Now I don't think I'd buy a non-Chinese new car or cellphone, lol.