[joe_mamba]

>The answer is, of course, yes.

No, not in this case.

> I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash.

Any country can make cars and phones now if they REALLY want to, they just don't because they wouldn't be competitive on the global market at performance and at scale. But not anyone can just make an EUV machine if they want to.

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.

And each of those suppliers, like Zeiss for example, is a leader because it has decades of expertise that can't be speed-run, even with IP theft. So before China can have an ASML it first needs a Zeiss. So ask yourself where is their Zeiss and are they beating the west's Zeiss?

[lambdaone]

This is a Manhattan Project-level endeavour, and most countries would not be capable of it. China, however, is. Even though it lacks the expertise to do all these specific things to the Western cutting edge level right now, it has the resources, the overall technology and engineering base, and the determination to achieve the goal with the full power of the Chinese economy behind it. Not to mention industrial espionage.

It might take them a decade, but they'll get there. Working on the basis that you can somehow stop China rather than merely delaying them is a comforting illusion.

[eloisant]

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.