How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/18/tech/china-west-ai-chips/

by artninja1988 • 7 months ago

470 568 7 months ago

japantimes.co.jp

Animats2• 7 months ago

A 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• 7 months ago

They built the project, the bomb hasn't gone boom yet though.

Animats2• 7 months ago

There'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• 7 months ago

The 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• 7 months ago

Managing 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• 7 months ago

I'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• 7 months ago

I agree. They have a long way to go. There is also something happening in Shanghai but I don’t know the progression.

mk894• 7 months ago

They 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.

Herring3• 7 months ago

I 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.

coliveira4• 7 months ago

Given the current high prices for chips and memory due to "AI" artificial resource scarcity, the world will welcome the additional chip production from China.

bgnn6• 7 months ago

They are nowhere close to beat ASML.

This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.

Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.

petre• 7 months ago

No, they won't beat ASML but they'll be good enough and most importantly cheap. And they'll catch up eventually.

askvictor• 7 months ago

So far only China has that incentive.

The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.

maxglute9• 7 months ago

Nowhere close, but pace now seems faster than estimated, i.e. original western estimate is they won't even get EUV prototype up until 2030s.

Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.

Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.

htrp2• 7 months ago

even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times

How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?

lofaszvanitt• 7 months ago

Plus the deliberately overcomplicated parts.

Aldo_MX• 7 months ago

This article is more skeptical:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...

culi3• 7 months ago

I'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

ReptileMan2• 7 months ago

The "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• 7 months ago

archive link??

madars• 7 months ago

It's quite easy to do it yourself - just open archive.is and paste the original URL in.

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=46307819

Ancalagon• 7 months ago

Seems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.

jakeinspace• 7 months ago

If 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• 7 months ago

At 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• 7 months ago

This 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).

simmerup2• 7 months ago

How much money would Taiwan have to be offerred to voluntarily place their heads under the boot of China

Herring3• 7 months ago

The track record says China will probably just buy Taiwan.

If you hate invasions so much, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.

aunty_helen• 7 months ago

Wars are old fashioned. This is a “special military operation”

cpursley2• 7 months ago

I know mass media keeps pounding this "eventual scenario" (manufacturing consent and all). Maybe it will happen, but the Chinese think on longer timelines than the ADHD West and are probably banking on A). Out-attriting, B). Out-innovating. If both happen, we might find ourselves with a situation where Taiwan voluntarily wants to align closer with China as the West flails.

simmerup2• 7 months ago

China know that the one child policy has fucked their demographics and that their future isn't as rosy as it might appear now

Herring3• 7 months ago

manufacturing consent

I think it's more like smearing/projection, like Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats being pedophiles. Guess where the real pedophiles were hanging out the whole time.

wood_spirit2• 7 months ago

China is building all kinds of suggestive tech including invasion barge piers to land heavy stuff quickly once a beachhead has been established http://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Invasion-Barge-OSINT.html

dluan4• 7 months ago

Peaceful democratic transition is also on the table when KMT wins back the presidency next.

pinewurst• 7 months ago

Read as "anyone connected flees to the US, anyone deemed political gets a free relocation to a Xinjiang re-education camp, and lots of new mainland 'mothers' live with those allowed to remain".

Why would anyone voluntarily sign up to have Winnie the Pooh's boot on their face?

bgwalter• 7 months ago

We 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?

culi3• 7 months ago

How did "we" learn that?

georgeburdell• 7 months ago

The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.

kccqzy2• 7 months ago

Sanctioning 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• 7 months 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

mk894• 7 months ago

The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.

I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...

culi3• 7 months ago

It seems most of those ASML employees were already Chinese engineers. I doubt they would care if they got caught and had their careers restricted to China

conradev• 7 months ago

  The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.

and

  Once inside, he recognized other former ASML colleagues who were also working under aliases and was instructed to use their fake names at work to maintain secrecy, the person said.

decafninja3• 7 months ago

Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.

While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.

Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.

And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.

mistercheph4• 7 months ago

Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies... And it turns out the only people for whom the technology is uncopyable or secret are... American citizens. The "proprietary" technology is trivial to steal, and legal protections don't matter outside of our borders, the legal protections and subsidies afforded to those building proprietary (secret) technologies only deprives Americans of the ability to innovate, while in peer nations like China, individuals and startups are totally free to use and enjoy American technology without any restrictions.

eastof2• 7 months ago

Is there any other way to see it than just we are too divided and 50% of our own people just think we are the bad guys? What you describe is so obvious but one political side in the US at least pretends this isn't happening and actively does anything they can to hamper any response to it. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am also part of the division, I truly don't understand the other side at all.

rnewme2• 7 months ago

In late 2022 our telco soft eng team got purged and everyone who was even friends with people who might be Chinese were removed from the project. That included the original architect and product owner, both Americans but with Chinese roots. So there that!

tokioyoyo3• 7 months ago

knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals

You're forgetting to mention that they're also getting paid a lot of money. Quite a lot of people will sell out, given the right conditions, for that amount of money especially in lower CoL areas. To be honest, I'm sure Western governments and companies could do the same if they wanted to bring in the expertise from China.

filloooo• 7 months ago

Handing out sanctions without at least a plausible legal cover, sounds like a recipe for disaster that would come back to bite.

I wonder what could be used here, non-compete? IP infringement? Or doing it "for all mankind"?

As for knowledge, the YouTube channel Branch Education explained EUV lithography in great detail, sponsored by ASML itself.

My impression is that the knowledge is not that secretive, the precision required at every step is the key.

kccqzy2• 7 months ago

Yeah it reminds me of the Smyth report, published in August 1945 about atomic bombs, commissioned by the director of the real Manhattan Project. It’s fine to reveal knowledge in detail, if it doesn’t reveal anything related to constructing the apparatuses (the chemistry and the metallurgy) needed.

maxglute9• 7 months ago

Well real question is how much would that limit PRC talent from working abroad. PRC will be producing plurality of STEM / high skilled talent for decades. They're going to be the only country with project intergrated circuit talent glut in next 10 years, every other semi power projected to have 100,000s shortage. No PRC talent, and you cap western semi talent pool.

Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.

Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.

fspeech• 7 months ago

Your point is right on. And additionally, why would an average Indian refuse the pay package to work in China? The top r&d guy at SMIC is from Taiwan after all. Liang got both Samsung and SMIC into the advanced nodes.

jokoon• 7 months ago

They were under NDA, probably

But the science was probably not

I don't think this is classified technology, although asml would like it if they were punished.

And even if it's patented, China has been stealing everything with little consequence

warkdarrior• 7 months ago

Patent system is an abomination anyway.

versteegen• 7 months ago

One interesting and ironic part of the article is that one of the mentioned optics research groups has been submitting a lot of patents on EUV sources. Are we meant to be mad about it?

Quothling• 7 months ago

Why would Holland sanction people who switch jobs? Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see how it might have happened if ASML had been an US company. I'm just not sure how you figure that it would happen in Europe.

_zagj3• 7 months ago

Unless things have changed much since the days of AQ Khan, that's probably the case.

pxc2• 7 months ago

It 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.

jandrewrogers3• 7 months ago

The 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.

pxc2• 7 months ago

When 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.

theautist• 7 months ago

It'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• 7 months 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.

mk894• 7 months 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_fuel7• 7 months ago

With 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-suppl...

apercu3• 7 months ago

If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.

We will also see talent pipeline erosion.

Just further Western industrial policy failure.

standardUser2• 7 months ago

Non-verifiable by what standards?

HPsquared• 7 months ago

Is it verifiable now?

solid_fuel7• 7 months ago

If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.

Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.

Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.

We will also see talent pipeline erosion.

We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.

[0] https://www.advocate.com/politics/pam-bondi-trans-equality-b... [1] https://ncac.org/news/advocacy-isnt-terrorism [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/26/us-trump-targets-opponen...

qoez• 7 months ago

Would be interesting if the US decides to ban or heavily tariff these chips and if the consequence will be significanly cheaper data center access through chinese-owned sites/platforms

the_pwner224• 7 months ago

You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.

With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.

That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.

Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.

Yoric3• 7 months ago

On the other hand, all it would take would be one successful Steam Deck/Steam Machine-style console to get all the developers of the world making sure that their games work on that hypothetical GPU.

I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?

downrightmike• 7 months ago

Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo

Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...

dontlaugh• 7 months ago

Yea, but less than in the past. Modern graphics APIs are much thinner layers.

This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.

citizenpaul3• 7 months ago

Its not really just that AMD drivers are not that great (they are not) but they have been stable for a long time.

Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.

Thats at least how things got where they are now.

solid_fuel7• 7 months ago

I believe the software will follow the hardware. Not immediately, of course, but if I want to learn to do ML and have to pick between a $2500 Nvidia GPU and a $500 Chinese GPU that's 80% as fast, I would absolutely take the cheap one and keep an eye out for patches.

When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.

overfeed2• 7 months ago

Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.

I don't think the Chinese government will be too upset if cheap Chinese GPUs work best with China-made games. It will be quite the cultural coup if, in 20 years time, the most popular shooter is a Chinese version of Call of Duty or Battlefield.

checker659• 7 months ago

There is nothing magical about CUDA

echelon3• 7 months ago

scaling down their consumer GPU production [0]
> Due to Memory Shortages

I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer. They're a gateway into the overall AI ecosystem.

Having feet planted there also make sure they can play the local game when that begins to blow up. Nvidia wants a robotics play, too.

This is a pragmatic choice. And most of the money is in commercial.

bigbadfeline• 7 months ago

I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer... This is a pragmatic choice.

You mean, NV is after the money with a heavy heart and a sad tear or two over the abandoned consumers, like "We love you so much but sorry, we must go pragmatic on you"?

And most of the money is in commercial.

This is a serious systemic failure and it's even wilder that it's accepted without question.

vslira• 7 months ago

It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.

christophilus5• 7 months ago

Exactly. That's where this is heading, and the West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.

quitit4• 7 months ago

Which then goes on to be repurposed into weapons of war.

Something to think about if considering the purchase of a DJI drone.

wslh• 7 months ago

They learn really fast. I will not take the past as a prediction of the future.

coliveira4• 7 months ago

The general trend of the industry is to move computational resources from the hands of users into data centers, so that they can control what can be done and how much they'll charge for computational services. In the medium term, a lot of what we take for granted nowadays will only be accessible from cloud providers and companies will pay more and more in subscriptions for these services.

rootusrootus• 7 months ago

How will that work, exactly? The chip makers are going to have a list of approved "cloud providers" and they will refuse to sell to anyone else?

wincy2• 7 months ago

Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.

matheusmoreira• 7 months ago

Computer freedom is dying. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Truly depressing...

segmondy• 7 months ago

scale down or not, we will see consumer GPU from China in the future. might be a copy or rip of existing GPUs, but it will happen. 3 of my GPU rigs are chinese MB built for the chinese market, ripoff of dual x99. They work, they are cheap, I got them for under $100 a piece. So maybe 5 years from now, we get cheap GPUs, and maybe they will be equivalent to 5090s, but who cares if the price is right?

maxglute9• 7 months ago

Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to brrrt chips stupid cheap if they have mature domestic tool scaling, enough to wipe litho+yield inefficiencies.

Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.

MoravecsParadox• 7 months ago

"your margin is my opportunity" - bezos

barfoure• 7 months ago

Your analysis is out of date I think. This has already happened. Poor NXP just got their asses handed to them by the PRC. The fab they have in Italy looks nice but PRC has many of those.

roenxi• 7 months ago

The NASDAQ line go up model is why the AI boom is happening and a major factor in why it is Western companies leading the charge. The more bigger issue is that the west refused to sell chips to China so they had to figure out how to make their own. And margin compression is what free markets do. That is one of the big motivators to putting free markets everywhere, the freer the market the more compressed the margins become. All the people working hard at crappy jobs start working hard at high paying jobs instead until the competition drives the money out of the sector.

There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?

CuriouslyC4• 7 months ago

The absolute irony of China being more capitalist than the US in some ways.

vablings• 7 months ago

It makes me feel so gross that these companies are leaving gamers behind. The whole idea of a GPU was from gaming and games. And the whole AI evolution was subsequently born over the fact that gamers/software engineers could toy around with incredibly powerful CUDA without having to shoehorn a weird graphics Api in the middle to do mathematics.

They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger

oytis• 7 months ago

Is AMD abandoning consumer market though? They seem to be much less in demand by AI industry.

mywittyname5• 7 months ago

At this point, the only reason to be in the consumer GPU market is because that's the first rung on the ladder that leads to the AI data center market.

cyberrock• 7 months ago

AMD is selling close to 10% of what Radeon* used to sell 15 years ago and yet it's all nVidia's fault: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-grabs-a-share...

Edit: I meant ATI but I guess AMD bought ATI in 2006! I thought that happened in the 2010s for some reason.

idiotsecant• 7 months ago

This is nothing but good for normal people in the west. Chinese competition is needed to remove some of the rent seeking from the system.

tester756• 7 months ago

There's still AMD and Intel doing dGPUs

zouhair• 7 months ago

Nvidia folding would be the best day of my life.

KronisLV• 7 months ago

At this point I’d straight up buy their PC components, because fuck Nvidia for doing that. Same goes for other manufacturers throwing the consumer segment into the dirt because of their greed.

I already got an Intel Arc to support more market competition (A580 was rough, B580 is a decent daily driver) and if the prices weren’t absolutely insane would have gotten the 245K (better than my 5800X, but not for the price).

pantalaimon• 7 months ago

It's just a matter of time until they show up on AliExpress - you can already order LoongArch systems (3A6000) and have them shipped to your doorstep.

Havoc2• 7 months ago

There are the More Threads GPUs.

They're kinda rubbish, but as a starting point / MVP for a parallel gaming hardware ecosystem its 100% viable.

nitwit0052• 7 months ago

A "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• 7 months ago

They are acquiring parts to reverse engineer them and build their own

nitwit0052• 7 months 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.

exceptione3• 7 months ago

+ industrial espionage to be able to reverse engineer it at all.

wood_spirit2• 7 months ago

A “manhattan project” can just mean a massive secret scientific war project? Seems apt.

agumonkey• 7 months ago

and a critical nation scale ambition

makeitdouble2• 7 months ago

They have high security, and obfuscating the premises is part of it, but is it really secret in any way ? I mean, we're knowing exactly what they're aiming for and could compare notes at the end of it.

Is it war ? in a "everything is a war" political sense, perhaps, but not in any other sense.

We're left with "massive project" for the analogy, that's kinda weak really.

why-o-why4• 7 months ago

I think the Manhattan Project is a poor analogy. Moonshot is more like it.

ReptileMan2• 7 months ago

A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.

I think that both Germany and USSR were not in the least shocked ... just the USA had the resources to finish it.

why-o-why4• 7 months ago

Well, USSR did finish, just 4 years later.

Maybe it was because we had all those immigrants working on it (e.g. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann)!

Qem2• 7 months ago

A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.

Once they break even they can overshoot into shocking new technology territory.

darth_avocado2• 7 months ago

A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.

You’re missing forest for the trees. ASML at the moment has the monopoly on these machines. This is not only a great tool for the West to keep China at bay, but also a way to maintain economic dominance. Even if they can’t get the machine up and running until 2030, and the machine is a generation behind, China has effectively gained leverage in world theater.

From geopolitical perspective, it’s huge. Right now Taiwan produces the world’s chips, so China plays nice. The minute they can produce their own chips, even an older generation, they can invade Taiwan anytime they want. And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.

a_wild_dandan• 7 months ago

Taiwan’s geopolitical position is vastly more complex than the fantasy where invasion would follow merely from fab parity.

petcat2• 7 months ago

And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.

This basically just means Europe wont have older chips.

TSMC is already producing a significant percentage of their chips in Arizona. And they've even slated ~30% of their total production of 2nm chips and better will be produced in USA by 2028-2029.

MassEffect5784• 7 months ago

I can't wait for China to put its full heft in manufacturing advanced graphics cards, fast storage and much more. We need competition.

lossolo3• 7 months ago

Also 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

hermitcrab• 7 months ago

Chinese dam projects have not always gone well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

DoctorOetker6• 7 months ago

intensive vs extensive quantities

nulld3v• 7 months ago

The 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• 7 months ago

In 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.

scotty794• 7 months ago

It'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.

christophilus5• 7 months ago

I 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.

scotty794• 7 months ago

How 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• 7 months ago

China 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• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

scotty794• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization_in_Ca...

Give China 50 years and I'm sure they are gonna be properly sad about what happened to Uyghurs, western style.

Or not. Measures applied to Uyghurs were done under the banner of fight with terror, which the West waved fervently as well. Although US decided to direct their zeal outside, bombing several countries and killing countless "enemies" which were defined as everybody within the blast radius. Were attempts of China at controlling their islamist minority so uncomparably worse?

Especially when we compare them to how they approached the problem of pandemics. They obviously have no qualms about attempting sweeping solutions regardless of religion and ethnicity of those affected.

immibis6• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

_lvbh2• 7 months ago

Japan

Pretty sure the US pressured Japan to up their exchange rate which was one of the factors in their stagflation. Germany never threatened the power of the US

scotty794• 7 months ago

So the US has always been terrible to the countries which growth they exploited?

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

Good 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.

standardUser2• 7 months ago

The 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• 7 months ago

The 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.

dluan4• 7 months ago

Reunification in Taiwan has nothing to do with chips, and militarily PRC was able to do so a long time ago. The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.

KylerAce• 7 months ago

Invading Taiwan isn't about chips at all, and in fact chips are actively disincentivizing invasion. Semiconductor fabs and the oodles of atomically precise ultra clean and ultra expensive equipment inside absolutely do not mix well with bombs.

mywittyname5• 7 months ago

get along with China better.

This will probably never happen. All countries are rivals, and the semblance of cooperation is really just the manifestation of a power imbalance.

China grew into their big boy pants and can hold their own on the international stage. They have no need to be cooperative because they are in the International Superpower Club. Their strategic ambitions do not align with those of their rivals, and they are strong enough to not need to play nice anymore.

Now that the US has also dropped their visage of being the benevolent world leader, there's even less reason for China to pretend to be cooperative. At this point, it's a matter of who is more apt to invade your country, US or China? And you buy weapons from the other one.

Maybe we see more "cooperation" between China and the EU or South America. But that will be entirely because those regions are under duress.

kulahan2• 7 months ago

You don’t think NZ and Aus are truly good friends?

subw00f• 7 months ago

Yeah, all those countries China has invaded really shows how apt they are to do that.

throwaway2902• 7 months ago

For all the talk about how they are an equal player on the international stage PRC is still a developing country by their own assessment and WTO.

energy1233• 7 months ago

I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).

Isn't that "other than" clause a big deal, though? I've read a survey and a number of articles from defense and foreign policy types, and the general feeling is there's a ~25% chance that China will invade Taiwan this decade. That's really damn big. If there's rollback in Taiwan then the first island chain could plausibly fall, or if not you will surely see Japan and maybe South Korea nuclearize. Why must we keep assuming the best with these security calculations instead of believing someone when they keep saying what they're going to do?

jjcc• 7 months ago

Give you some more historical context: China (ROC) planned to invade west China until the plan was given up in 60's. Both sides wanted reunification by force. When China's navy and air force was superior in early 1950's, it tried to "establish blockade of trade with west China (PRC) along the Chinese coast" (1)

China eventually gave up the plan in 1960's not because it didn't want to but because the balance of the power weighting over to west China. In 80's and 90's both agree to make peace given the premise that both sides belong to China.

TSMC was a product of industry policy from None-democratic China government. The founder Morris Chang ， an American born in the west China ，never visited China before 50 years old.

Both China (before 90') and west China used to want reunification , by force or not. China changed a bit later. The motivation of west China to invade China has little to do with chips although US thought that's the critical incentive. West China will still let TSMC provide the chips to the world in case it would have successfully invaded China in my view.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Tuapse

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

Thanks. In my view, the PRC is making a huge strategic mistake. As is Taiwan. The PRC is too focused on full control, normally they're more long-term-minded, but in this case they're rushing it too much. Establishing a trade-bloc and peaceful relations first and then aiming for full reunification would be the smart play, since there isn't anything huge to gain outside of TSMC (that I know of) by way of an invasion.

Taiwan is too dependent on the west, it too should know it can't actually resist an invasion, and that the west won't do much when it comes down to it. Its interests would have been served best if it sought good trade relations with the PRC, so that the PRC will continue to rely on TSMC. it should be providing west-china with all the nice chips the west is forbidding it from having. It should have been more like india and less like south korea.

hyruo• 7 months ago

This 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.

gnarlouse• 7 months ago

Hopefully this doesn’t stoke a third and final world war.

makeitdouble2• 7 months ago

The "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.

kulahan2• 7 months ago

Well if anyone gets a pass to be flippant with the analogy… it’s probably the Japanese

beAbU3• 7 months ago

Was the manhattan project specifically stood up so that the US can bomb japan? Or was Japan just the first unfortunate target?

dluan4• 7 months ago

It'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• 7 months ago

I 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?

scrlk2• 7 months ago

Oneshotted by refusing to update priors from 1990s-era 'End of History' thinking.

this_user• 7 months ago

The 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.

lyu07282• 7 months ago

we speak the truth about stuff

Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.

nebula88045• 7 months ago

we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial

Unless you are talking about Israel :P

ajsnigrutin• 7 months ago

A better question here is, would china be doing this, if "the west" wasn't threathening (and implementing) all kinds of sanctions on them, giving them no choice but to go "the bender way", by making their own chips (with blackjack, and hookers!).

terminalshort6• 7 months ago

It is always like that. Most people just don't have the attitude of getting things done, and they can barely believe it is possible when they watch what the people who do accomplish.

nebula88045• 7 months ago

A lot of things require sacrifice beyond reasonable means. I see these books on how Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla developed their innovations, its groups of people that are extremely talented and became that talented due to sacrifices from their families/communities that go and sacrifice everything themselves to achieve amazing goals. Some of that resultant wealth goes to them but most goes to the shareholders/tech bros.

Eventually less and less people want to go down this route so we get "people just not having the attitude of getting things done".

The real question is will Chinese people go down that same road or will the fact that there is so much cutthroat competition there keep people in line?

wewxjfq• 7 months ago

It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.

fullshark• 7 months ago

It's an overcorrection for years of western arrogance being expressed in the past decade+. I think most people have woken up by now to the reality of Chinese manufacturing dominance and what that implies, at least those in power and journalists.

zelphirkalt• 7 months ago

Is "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• 7 months ago

When 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.

stupidhooper2• 7 months ago

Why 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.

mattmaroon3• 7 months ago

It’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.

xwindowsorg2• 7 months ago

Why not Moonshot projects? like Google X.

stupidhooper2• 7 months ago

You think the headline isn’t a violent superlative?

jandrewrogers3• 7 months 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”.

stackedinserter2• 7 months ago

Because they will become violent to us once they can afford to be violent to us.

amluto5• 7 months ago

If 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

jpgvm2• 7 months ago

Yeah 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• 7 months 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.

impossiblefork2• 7 months ago

XFEL is going to be destructive to the chip. It can't be the future.

entangledqubit• 7 months ago

DARPA funded a bit in this space a while ago. (Example: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/darpa-maskless-nanowri...) I'm not sure how you get over the bandwidth limitations, even with multi-beam.

AlotOfReading2• 7 months ago

What bandwidth limitations are you referencing? My understanding is that deep euv lithography is limited by chromatic aberration, so the narrow bandwidth of a single beam FEL would be an advantage. If you need more bandwidth, you can chirp it. Is the bandwidth too high?

amluto5• 7 months ago

This is a totally different technology.

A free electron laser (FEL) uses free electrons (electrons not attached to a nucleus) as a lasing medium to produce light. The light would shine through a mask and expose photoresist more or less just like the light from ASML’s tin plasma contraption, minus the tin plasma. FELs, in principle, can produce light over a very wide range of wavelengths, including EUV and even shorter.

That DARPA thing is a maskless electron beam lithography system: the photoresist is exposed by hitting it directly with electrons.

Electrons have lots of advantages: they have mass, so much less kinetic energy is needed to achieve short wavelengths. They have charge, so they can be accelerated electrically and they can be steered electrically or magnetically. And there are quite a few maskless designs, which saves the enormous expense of producing a mask. (And maskless lithography would let a factory make chips that are different in different wafers, which no one currently does. And you need a maskless technique to make masks in the first place.) There were direct-write electron-beam research fabs, making actual chips, with resolution comparable to or better than the current generation of ASML gear, 20-30 years ago, built at costs that were accessible to research universities.

But electrons have a huge, enormous disadvantage: because they are charged, they repel each other. So a bright electron beam naturally spreads out, and multiple parallel beams will deflect each other. And electrons will get stuck in electrically nonconductive photoresists, causing the photoresist to (hopefully temporarily) build up a surface charge, interfering with future electron beams.

All of that causes e-beam lithography to be slow. Which is why those research fabs from the nineties weren’t mass-producing supercomputers.

cess11• 7 months ago

I'm not all that familiar with the intricacies of this industry but it seems they have at least one corporation with ambitions in this area:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3333641/chin...

That mention of "quantum" seems suspicious, but it's beyond me to judge whether their presentations are credible:

http://lumi-universe.com/?about_33/

If they actually produce machines that can do ~14 nm stuff on "desktop" sized equipment, perhaps we'll see a lot of it eventually. As far as I can remember a lot of decent processing and storage chips were made with ~14 nm processes over the last decade or so.

amluto5• 7 months ago

Oh, that’s neat. It uses high-harmonic generation.

My sole personal experience with any sort of harmonic generation was being in the room while some grad students debugged a 266nm laser that consisted of a boring 1064nm Nd:YAG laser followed by two frequency doublers. Quite a lot of power was lost in each stage, and the results of accidentally letting the full 1064nm source power loose were mildly spectacular.

I wish Lumiverse luck getting any appreciable amount of power out of their system. (FELs, in contrast, seem to be cable of monstrous power output — that’s never been the problem AFAIK.)

P.S. never buy a 532nm laser from a non-reputable source. While it’s impressive that frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers are small and cheap enough to be sold as laser pointers these days, it’s far too easy for highly dangerous amounts of invisible 1064nm radiation to leak out, whether by carelessness or malice. I have a little disreputable ~510nm laser pointer, which I chose because, while I don’t trust the specs at all, 510nm is likely produced directly using a somewhat unusual solid state source, and it can’t be produced at all using a doubled Nd:YAH laser. The color is different enough that I’m confident they’re not lying about the wavelength.

riobard• 7 months ago

China has several teams working on FEL and several experimenting light sources, the latest being built in Shenzhen https://www.iasf.ac.cn/

neilv• 7 months ago

Of 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• 7 months ago

And 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 ... ...

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

Domestically, 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.

vasco3• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying

dleeftink3• 7 months ago

All is copied in one way or another, progress in a vacuum is truly artificial and those who've been singularly credited for certain inventions likely have so because of the luck of the draw.

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

You’re not wrong to think that way. But now there’s less and less left for China to “copy,” and it’s hard to argue that many things aren’t being invented by China itself.

Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?

kavalg2• 7 months ago

And that copying was largely enabled by our greedy western bean counters that outsourced so many things in the first place.

never_inline• 7 months ago

If I was in china's position and so much is at stake, how can I go towards engineering all the tech from scratch when I can reverse engineer existing tech from west?

kaycey2022• 7 months ago

I don't see why copying is unnatural or even bad. Maybe within a single economy or a group of economies which share a common understanding and laws, chosing to discourage copying to incentivise other citizen innovators makes sense.

But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?

In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.

None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.

dleeftink3• 7 months ago

Hopefully, this century, we can shed some of the 'dominating' mindset that has led to technological exclusionism in the first place. Not that catching up to the state-of-the-art isn't warranted, but that progress will become pocketed once more if we keep falling for the same economic traps.

darkstar_162• 7 months ago

It's interesting how this comes up when the west is the one that is trying to catch up :)

barrenko• 7 months ago

The final outcome is affected by the final 10%, you can even call it 1%, for which the semi-corrupt or "communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.

bean469• 7 months ago

"communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.

I don't have the data to back it up, but I think that there is actually the same amount of will and talent in China as in the West

lm284692• 7 months ago

The level of cope... The US and the west in general is on a much more dire trajectory than China (which is facing its own demons, no doubt about that)

There is not much left of communism in China besides the name, it's more akin to a government steered economy, which arguably is very similar to what the west had when we moved at our peak speed, albeit more authoritarian. They still have what we mostly lost: a long term historical view of geopolitic.

NooneAtAll3• 7 months ago

I wonder how much scam there is on US side...

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

To 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.

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

“transparent computing” -> this shit: https://www.science.org/content/article/critics-pounce-china...

powerapple5• 7 months ago

IMO, the difference between East and West is money allocation. In west, especially in the US, there are a lot money in the private sector, they will take the risk and fund moonshot projects; in China, the state will (have to) play that role. Yes, 90% of the projects will fail in the portfolio, that's part of the game.

iknowSFR2• 7 months ago

There’s a NYT’s interview several months back where the journalist phrased it as in America, you have to prove success first to get funded. But in China, funding comes first and the successful companies emerge.

andyjohnson02• 7 months ago

This is how we approach everything.
This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.

Is there any evidence that this kind of homogeneous "national character" is objectively real? Or is it just another story that people tell themselves?

brazukadev• 7 months ago

was the American dream real at any point? Sounds like the same to me. Just a less individualistic dream.

NotGMan• 7 months ago

Does it need to be homogenous? In the end, only a few people are needed to create companies and drive the vision.

NemoNobody• 7 months ago

Google the top 25 cities in China Skylines.

Your going to feel humbled.

powerapple5• 7 months ago

I don't agree. I think this comes out of necessity. What else a developing country can do in order to develop itself? Everyone believes they are unique and different, I don't agree.

snapcaster4• 7 months ago

I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.

Material conditions shape history

heavyset_go3• 7 months ago

To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".

It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.

maxsilver• 7 months ago

I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.

I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.

(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.

Material conditions shape history

Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.

nathias• 7 months ago

ideologies are part of the material conditions

zhengyi13• 7 months ago

Why are people so allergic to materialism?

At the risk of starting a fight... I would point at America's religious history, and the continuing threads of that today that increasingly see scientific/materialist thought as a direct threat to their ideas of how a society ought to be organized.

acituan2• 7 months ago

Why would you assume culture is immaterial? And to make this less emotional let’s take the micro scale; don’t you think the culture of doing engineering doesn’t affect outcomes team to team within the same company, or company to company within the same country or even country to country within the same company?

PKop• 7 months ago

Does this include the material conditions of human bio diversity? You deny "way of thinking" is itself a material differentiation but could that not be an expression of material conditions over time reshaping separate groups of people to act and think differently, who were through differing selective pressures, environments, adaptations and historical contingencies themselves "shaped" differently?

Or do you yourself have a religious belief in strict human blank slate equality?

3371• 7 months ago

Well if you have pay attention this user you would realize he is a very classic example of an educated and proud Chinese. No offense but an unusual amount of Chinese uniformly think and talk like that thanks to the education.

estimator7292• 7 months ago

Because a shared cultural identity is vital to maintain a cohesive society that can muster the collective resources to get shit done?

The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.

Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?

zrn900• 7 months ago

Why are people so allergic to materialism?

They are made so in the Angloamerican West. The establishment wants them to focus on 'values' instead. Because if the people started thinking about material conditions, they would topple the system that concentrates 99% of the wealth in the hands of the 0.1%.

qcnguy6• 7 months ago

It’s only a matter of time, but time matters, as they say.

You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.

But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.

The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.

That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.

The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.

SubiculumCode• 7 months ago

The analogy with Russia is too obtuse to be useful. Russia never was an economic exporting powerhouse with tons of manufacturing know-how and willing engagement in the larger international capitalist economies. I am no fan of the PRC, but there is plenty of intellectual, innovation, and economic competition within China to make your analogy unlikely to be helpful.

That said, the U.S., if it wants to stay ahead, also needs to fight trends toward reducing competition via de facto monopolistic behaviors by mega corporations with co-opted governmental protections.

owenversteeg3• 7 months ago

The history of Soviet electronics manufacturing is fascinating, but there are some huge differences and I actually don't think the private sector is the largest. One is the pace and type of innovation. In the 70s and 80s the landscape was incredibly dynamic and technology went through several huge changes. If you wanted to run a clone of the US tech industry then, you would need a distributed, dynamic effort across many fields and not a top-down directed Manhattan Project. In 2025 we do have rapid technological change, but things are much more consolidated. In terms of strategically important recent innovations I can only think of EUV and AI. That's much more Manhattan-Project-able.

The other difference - which is even more significant - is that China is already far ahead in advanced manufacturing. The US was lightyears ahead of the Soviets in advanced manufacturing, which is what allowed us to win in the 70s and 80s. Now, we're so far behind it's not even funny. Sure, the West still makes some ultra-precise machines for EUV, but look where most of the components in those machines are made...

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

The argument that never fails to appear: China’s failures are blamed on communism, while China’s successes are attributed to capitalism.

seec• 7 months ago

I agree a lot.

China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently. Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.

This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation. The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better. They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.

And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.

For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.

I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.

Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.

hearsathought4• 7 months ago

Domestically, 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.

That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.

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.

It isn't a "chinese way of thinking". It is assumed everywhere that some level "corruption and fraud" is baked into any large scale investment or endeavor. It's simply a matter of managing it so as not to consume the whole project.

maxglute9• 7 months ago

The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do". Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.

That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it. They're the only country whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by UN. That's the context behind the quote (directed at domestic doubters), every other country in the world has to pick and choose what to specialize in, PRC doesn't, so as long as item is not made by god, PRC can figure out how to build it.

The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true. There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.

didibus• 7 months ago

I understood OP's saying more as "appetite for doing".

Ignoring the practical reality that you need resources, capacity, good planning, and so on to actually do something. I understood OP as saying the mindset in China is that they want to do it all. They are willing to invest even in things that would have poor ROI, if they can come into an industry and undercut by taking a smaller margin they will.

If so, that is a difference in attitude. In the west, we are only interested in returns that beat our alternatives. Capital is divested based on maximizing return on investment. This is why we even allowed many industries in the first place to move to China and we exited those segments domestically.

yanhangyhy9• 7 months ago

That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.

A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.

States may disappear, nations may vanish, and once-advanced countries can become backward. Most of them will never return to their former national glory. “If others can do it, we can do it” only becomes a true national characteristic if it is persistently pursued, strictly implemented, and internalized into the national mindset. Japan clearly does not fall into this category.

In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset. Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition. Essentially, it is not a national character. Look at Japan’s reliance on fax machines and Yahoo, or the chaos in Germany’s train system—it shows that this is an advantage created by a particular population with a special disposition, useful only for a limited time. The pace of deindustrialization in these two countries is also very fast: Japan now heavily depends on tourism, and Germany has become something of a joke.

If you browse YouTube or other video platforms, you can see that the people of China and the United States have, and continue to have, the national confidence and “hands-on” culture of the world’s largest industrial powers. In the U.S., there are many farm owners and ordinary laborers who are skilled at making and producing things—they are the foundation of the country. Capitalism merely led the U.S. down a different path.

TheRoque2• 7 months ago

Love 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• 7 months ago

China, 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.

TheRoque2• 7 months ago

Even that is true, it still doesn't make the west one block, and such title makes it believe so. There are no chip makers in Europe, so why even include it on the title ?

Longlius• 7 months ago

ASML is a Dutch company.

charintstr• 7 months ago

China 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-• 7 months ago

"the people said"

chenzhekl• 7 months ago

I 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.

beAbU3• 7 months ago

2030 is around the corner though.

letmetweakit• 7 months ago

Some competition for Nvidia is good, might drive down prices. One can only hope.

animistically• 7 months ago

Complex 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• 7 months ago

Reverse-engineered is a nice way of writing stole.

Havoc2• 7 months ago

It 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".

SideburnsOfDoom• 7 months ago

Are 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• 7 months ago

I 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.

stackedinserter2• 7 months ago

Western 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• 7 months ago

Correction: sanctions worked and now they’re building better chips than us

HardCodedBias• 7 months ago

Never 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• 7 months ago

Sure, 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.

assemblyman2• 7 months ago

I 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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