Can China build its own ASML?

https://nikkei.shorthandstories.com/can-china-build-its-own-asml/

by pieterr • 25 days ago

51 93 25 days ago

nikkei.shorthandstories.com

monssooon• 25 days ago

They can land stuff on the moon... Generally they have world class engineers and production... Just from that point or view I don't see why not...

usrnm• 25 days ago

Humanity has been able to land stuff on the Moon for 60 years. It's not easy, but not particularly cutting edge as well. A modern EUV machine is much more complicated

A_D_E_P_T• 25 days ago

The answer is, of course, yes. What is there to stop them? Sure, it's difficult -- but where there's a will, and where the resources of China are involved, there is most assuredly a way.

I remember when their cars were a joke, and when their cellphones were cheap trash. Now I don't think I'd buy a non-Chinese new car or cellphone, lol.

ThrowawayTestr• 25 days ago

Is cutting edge even necessary? If you could build the last two nodes 10x as cheaply that would be way more valuable.

SXX• 25 days ago

If you have stolen IP designed for cutting edge processes you need about the same tech to produce said IP.

Producing 10x of 10-years old GPUs is not exactly useful for modern AI codebases for instance.

trvz• 25 days ago

Cheaper isn’t even required; just better scalability.

eloisant2• 25 days ago

They're already capable to build microprocessors completely in-house. This is precisely the cutting edge we're talking about.

This matters for AI datacenters in particular, if they want to be autonomous in building them they need to be able to build advanced microprocessors locally.

exceptione3• 25 days ago

The comparison with cars and cellphones falls short for ASML machines. The former categories involved western companies transferring IP to Chinese counterparts. So far, the Chinese have succeeded in stealing IP from ASML, but this is complexity in its own category. Also, the whole supply chain is part of the solution. That is a lot to copy.

But I agree that, given enough time, China should be able to. But Volvo en Tesla handing over IP themselves, and phone makers letting China produce and assemble phones (maybe not as extensive these days anymore) is something different.

EDIT: I mentioned Saab when I meant Volvo. Not sure if people downvoted based on that, I have no info on Saab so consider that as a mistake.

saidnooneever• 25 days ago

people overstate complexity of ASmL machines. They are not impossible to make or use, specialist work sure but its possible. The only reason why no one does it is: 1) IP laws, 2) Costs

China has Money and Smart people. (and very effective corporate / nationstate espionage) so they can most certainly reproduce advanced machines.

They might not have incentive yet to do it because it will not make them popular, and potentially output products would be banned on US/EU. They play a long game and want US and EU consumers to ask tehir governments to please allow the chinese products.. so their market share is safe and stable.

I think once there is enough incentive for them they would do it. They simply do not want to do it currently.

amelius• 25 days ago

We'll soon be reading science textbooks in Chinese.

TFNA2• 25 days ago

It has recently been reporting that China is cutting back foreign-language programmes in universities because AI translation is seen as the way of the future. So, in their view everyone will soon be reading science textbooks, whether of Chinese provenance or not, in any language.

joe_mamba7• 25 days ago

The answer is, of course, yes.

No, not in this case.

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

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

Becoming a leader in commodity white goods like a phones and cars is a different beast than EUV machines. The challenges are not even remotely comparable.

China doesn't have a Zeiss, it doesn't have an ASM, it doesn't have a Cymer, it doesn't have a Trumpf, and it doesn't have a dozen other domestic competitors to western suppliers of critical parts that make an EUV machine.

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

eloisant2• 25 days ago

They have more than 1 billion people that are getting more and more educated, they have the capital and will to invest in it, they will get there eventually.

The "moat" we're talking about with private companies is that it's very hard for competitors to get enough funding to compete, and private investors are unwilling to invest in a company that will compete with a big established player. That's completely different when a state has a strategy and decides to invest to achieve a goal.

lambdaone3• 25 days ago

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

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

tim333• 25 days ago

China doesn't have a Zeiss

It has the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP)

Founded 1952. One of its things:

4-Metre Silicon Carbide (SiC) Mirror: CIOMP successfully manufactured the world's largest single-piece Silicon Carbide mirror blank. It provides the optical backbone for high-resolution space telescope imaging systems

Apparently carbide mirrors are used for EUV lithography.

Nature article + pic of mirror https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-022-01050-w

ilovecake1984• 25 days ago

Their cars and phones are still second rate. They are, however, cheap enough to be good value.

crote• 25 days ago

Their cars and phones are still second rate

So are modern Western cars - and arguably also phones.

If I'm forced to drive in a bug-riddled impossible-to-repair privacy-invading spaceship either way, why would I go for the overpriced outdated Western one rather than the affordable innovative Chinese one?

I would prefer a boring 2000s car with an electric drivetrain, but it's not like anyone is making them...

epolanski• 25 days ago

Have had two Xiaomi phones in a row, I don't see the second rate.

My in law has a BYD Seagull, fail to see how it lags compared to similarly priced cars.

Chinese cars are incredibly popular in Europe, because they are better cars at the same price tag, even the more expensive ones.

I think it's asinine to think their high end manufacturing is crap, keeps us non competitive, let alone ignoring most of our stuff or large parts of it already comes from China.

And it has nothing to do with wages, modern high end manufacturing is highly automated and skilled engineers are as expensive as in southern or central Europe.

throwaw122• 25 days ago

Their cars and phones are still second rate

What have you tried so far on a daily basis to say this?

Have you tried latest Huawei models?

By the way, Foxconn makes iPhones, does it count as Chinese quality or not?

Markoff5• 24 days ago

their phones are second rate to what - pixels with exploding batteries and faulty displays or Samsungs unable to fix their slow quality cameras for the last decade? sorry, if I want the best overall Android phone the choice nowadays is clear

as for the cars, I'd agree maybe compared to most western brands, but the question is whether is worth paying 30-100% extra for only slightly better western car

andy_ppp• 25 days ago

The usual game plan of getting the technology they want to copy by offering cheap and highly skilled Chinese labour and access to the Chinese market by building the machines there is not available to them, so the likelihood is this will take longer and be more difficult than other implementations. There's hundreds of other technologies needed other than the lasers and the mirrors and the software and the experience running these machines at scale. I think to make more than a handful of GPUs they will be behind for at least 5 years.

This doesn't mean they will always be behind though.

If I was ASML I would have an AI generated honeypot of techniques that are plausible but incorrect for China to go after on this and make sure you get hacked by them.

IAmBroom2• 23 days ago

My ASML supervisor literally said to me. circa 2006 (when I asked why we didn't shred our engineering papers): "With all the trouble we have getting these things to work, we should give our notes to the competitors to slow them down!"

chvid5• 25 days ago

"What is there to stop them?" Washington for sure is trying their very best and has so far been quite successful.

defrost• 25 days ago

ASML of the Netherlands agreed to go along with past US requests to not supply China with bleeding edge machines, so China is making do with the older models while working hard to break the non-US hardware monopoly.

Washington, via the recent MATCH Act, has requested ASML to not supply or maintain any of the older equipment.

ASML has travelled to Washington to tell US Congress to take a long walk off a short pier.

fauigerzigerk• 25 days ago

The US has successfully stopped them from acquiring the machines. That's not the same as stopping them from acquiring the capability to make them. On the contrary.

IshKebab• 25 days ago

Crazy that the US had to block ASML selling to China. I would have thought they'd do that themselves to reduce the risk of reverse engineering.

gregoriol• 25 days ago

Trying to prevent someone from having something they want is the best way to make them work twice harder to get it.

tancop• 25 days ago

asml will be profitable even after china catches up with their current tech. its not a silicon valley type company that wants a monopoly. if anything most of their engineers secretly want china to compete so they can push each other to do more advanced research.

rvnx4• 25 days ago

One scenario: it will be profitable because European and US governments are going to forbid companies like NVIDIA to use Chinese machines.

Quothling• 25 days ago

I think what is crazy here is that the USA can block a Dutch company from selling their products. Don't get me wrong, this would have made sense in the world 15 years ago, but today? We all know that China plays dirty, but all those US made LLM's sure seem to know an awful lot about things in IP protected content.

Though to be fair, I think everyone knew that China was always going to have their 100% domestic chip manufacturing supply chain. I'd argue that the blocks were mainly a delaying tactic by the USA oligarchy. Simply blocking ASML from doing business with China would in itself motivate China to move faster, but I guess the decision makers and their advisors calculated that it would be slower than letting China buy the machinery and reverse engineer it.

Of course that didn't really work out. The only reason the media is picking up on these stories is that China, did, get their hands on the machinery, but then... of course they did.

throw1234567891• 25 days ago

I think what is crazy here is that the USA can block a Dutch company from selling their products.

Because the light source comes from the US.

HSO• 25 days ago

obviously

the qn is if it will be what china wants and needs

more likely something better or more suited to the ecosystem in china will emerge

jruz• 25 days ago

I love to see China evolving so fast, the only producers bringing prices down.

metalman• 25 days ago

China IS building it's own chip foundrys and lithographic machines that ARE producing chips that ARE closing the gap towards parity with the best western (ASML) companys. The question is can they do that, this year, or next?

exceptione3• 25 days ago

I thought the time frame of 10 years is the most recent forecast.

NordStreamYacht2• 25 days ago

Inevitable. Huawei already had 7nm a couple of years ago.

dangero• 25 days ago

They used ASML machines to make that…

NordStreamYacht2• 24 days ago

By repurposing an older machine which wasn't designed for that node.

More than what Intel could do with all their money and access.

didip• 25 days ago

I don’t see why not. China can move a mountain with a billion spoons if they want to.

China’s willpower and centralized deployment of that willpower is legendary.

rvnx4• 25 days ago

Yes and that will be great. More competition = more choice = less political risk = great.

Protectionism policies are blocking low prices (what about tariffs ? what about monopolies ?) and are benefiting only the ones holding the knowledge and factories at the detriment of the rest of humanity.

Can't wait for ASML / TSMC / Zeiss equivalents so we can have access to memory sticks and GPUs / AI accelerators to run Qwen Super-Large distilled on Claude Zulu model, GTA VIII or whatever will come at that time.

babuskov• 25 days ago

The question is "can anyone". Makes you wonder why the USA hasn't built one? Maybe the latest technology required some rare discovery. Just like nobody can replicate the taste of Coca Cola, maybe there some tiny detail that they discovered by experimenting.

joe_mamba7• 25 days ago

Makes you wonder why the USA hasn't built one?

They basically (almost) did. In 2013 ASML bought US Cymer(the maker of EUV light sources) and in 2001 ASML acquired the US-based lithography equipment manufacturer Silicon Valley Group (SVG) after it had encountered liquidity issues.

Basically, the US had everything needed, the EUV light sources and lithography machines, just spread over different companies facing financial issues, so ASML came at the right moment and bought them all and integrated into their own business.

Just because ASML is based in NL doesn't mean all of its EUV secret sauce IP is domestically Dutch. Most of it comes from the US, which is why the US government maintains such a high influence of ASML's trade restrictions.

guiraldelli• 25 days ago

"Most of [IP of ASML] comes from US" is an extremely generous sentence.

It is true those companies you referred to were bought and their IP has helped ASML in _EUV_, but they had 20 years of European IP before that, all related other parts of the lithography machine (and not EUV) that made ASML the company it is.

If you think that complexity is only in (light) source for EUV (is it already profitable for ASML, by the way?), then you have no idea the complexity of that machine!

Disclaimer: I worked in their metrology department.

rvnx4• 25 days ago

It doesn't help that Coca-Cola has privileged access to decocainized flavor extract, from there, others are guaranteed to struggle to get access to one ingredient.

The main flabbergasting stuff about Coca-Cola is the fact that they choose to use HFCS in some countries, and sugar in others, and this is due to... protectionism again that artificially skews competition like for electronics.

_davide_• 25 days ago

What a well written article!

isoprophlex• 25 days ago

Why couldn't they? Why wouldn't they? Why should anyone resist them?

The US is ran by a moronic kleptocracy of conmen and number-go-up techbros that give precisely zero shits about human rights and improving life for the average citizen.

There is no way to defend the moral or political superiority of the west anymore. And who needs to worry about foreign intervention destabilizing internal affairs when we let the extremists, the populists do that for us?

At least if China pulls this off we might get some semi-affordable RAM and SSDs.

utopiah• 25 days ago

ASML literally makes the most complex machines on Earth. Sure rockets are powerful and they help us reach outer space ... yet they need computers to do so. Computers in turn are made with lithography machines and the SOTA is ASML.

Also ASML is not alone. In fact ASML can not exists without its partners, first and foremost American Department of Energy but also s IMEC in Belgium and Zeiss in Germany. Those are all SOTA in either R&D or production. They are not "some of the best" they are literally the best in their very complex expertise. In fact they have to collaborate reach such level.

... and yet, it's "just" that. There is nothing magical about ASML. Yes it might be practically impossible because of IP, economics, etc but still China (or anyone else) can definitely pour a lot of resources to try and make significant process. Will the result be competitive though in light of the moat ASML has, in particular partnerships, that is hard to imagine.

PS edit : I did like Chris Miller's "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" and FWIW did have a former colleague working at ASML and been invited to IMEC events.

khurs• 25 days ago

Any nation state can build pretty much anything (albeit over a varying time period), because at the State Level the budgets can be billions, no commercial pressure and also immunity from prosecution (e.g. a Chinese spy caught would be traded for something or another and returned home and state authorised hackers based in China won't get extradited).

The only thing to stop them is the will of more powerful states.

If you take Iran as an example, they would have possessed Nuclear weapons long ago if it wasn't for USA/Israel as Iran as a state will throw everything at it.

p.s. And that's a very detailed and well laid out visual article above usual broadsheet standards.

fulafel• 25 days ago

Kind of.. but at the same time:

A nation state will fail at most things, because there's no budget, and there's commercial pressure, democratic pressure etc.

One of the few things to make it work is lack of competition. Iran: they have a nuclear program because they can't buy what they want from the market.

rich_sasha2• 25 days ago

As many comments say, of course they can. They are an illiberal country, very good at semi-centrallised command, semi market economy. They have shown a number of areas where through determination and massive central effort they bridged enormous gaps. Chinese cars are already much better than a lot of established tech, not to mention solar, batteries etc.

I do however wonder how long China can afford to pay the price for this. China is effectively heavily subsidising it's export and research efforts to catch up. But subsidizing with what? They don't have a magic money tree.

To flesh it out a bit more: people in the West complain that the Chinese are unfairly competing, by selling their stuff - cars, batteries, chips etc - at an unfairly low price, either via subsidies or an artificially low exchange rate (or both). There's also IP theft, sure, but there's plenty of home grown IP too.

So this means that when German workers build a car, they get paid a lot more than the Chinese workers. The Chinese AI researchers get paid less than the Americans - for the same work. Sure, it's a mix of patriotic fervor, different purchasing power of the salary (agricultural goods are cheaper in China because farmers get paid less for the same work), etc etc. Subsidies are the same thing scaled up - Chinese government collects taxes, i.e. makes Chinese people work more for the same ultimate outcome.

But this extra economic heft is not coming from nowhere. China is channeling funds that it could spend elsewhere, but instead spends on high IP industries.

Europe and US could do the same. But at a cost! They could tax people more, who would have less money to spend (making them unhappy and affecting GDP growth), or cut investment elsewhere. You could finance it with debt, and we all know how well this tends to go.

I don't know enough about the Chinese economy to even try to have an opinion as to where this money is coming from, and what they aren't spending it on but should. But the unwind is coming sooner or later. You can't subsidise something forever. You can't grow your GDP with subsidies. So what's going to give?

It might be that they are hoping to kill foreign industry, become a monopoly and milk it, like the US under Trump is trying to in smaller scale. But of they were a free economy, it would be a race - can they stay solvent for long enough? Liberal or not, they are still an economy, and you can't beat gravity forever. I'm curious how it plays out.

orwin2• 25 days ago

But subsidizing with what? They don't have a magic money tree.

They do though. The advantage of state capitalism is that at anytime you can switch from a fully capitalist economy, where the market is everywhere save the family cell, to a statist economy where the state decides what goes where, to anything in between. If the CCP says 'retirement won't be paid in RMB but in foodstuffs for everyone, and the funds are reappropriated', they kill their debt.

rich_sasha2• 25 days ago

Right - but means of production can't be created and destroyed from nothing. Proper centrally planned economies all thought it could and failed.

China is much more free at moving them from one place to another, in particular allocating them differently to the hedonistic preferences of their citizens.

But it's still only moving not creating. For now it seems, the thing that needs to give is the workers' consumption. What else? No idea.

chvid5• 25 days ago

The latest from Huawei (which is probably the company to watch here) is an idea called "logic folding" which will squeeze more juice out of DUVL by 3D-stacking logic chips.

So far they have announced road maps and benchmarks for their upcoming products using this. A new Kirin-series phone/laptop chip and an Ascend AI accelerator - stated performance comparable to leading US products made with EUVL.

Products are due in August.

chvid5• 25 days ago

HUAWEI Presents the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, Enabling Breakthroughs in Transistor Density and System Performance

https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/5/ieee-iscas-tau-scaling

[Shanghai, China, May 25, 2026] Today, at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), He Tingbo from HUAWEI delivered a keynote speech titled "New Semiconductor Path in Practice". In her speech, she presented the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry. This law proposes replacing geometric scaling with time (τ) scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems. Based on this principle, innovative technologies such as LogicFolding can be used to continuously compress signal propagation delay and steadily improve transistor density, which will drive the ongoing evolution of semiconductors and electronic systems.

ieatcandlewax• 24 days ago

I saw this clickbait article once about how china was making laser propelled submarines, and the 3D stacking logic chips kind of sounds about as outlandish.

Looking into it, they are "folding" a logic chip to have shorter paths with their SRAMs, which is the main application of 3D integration these days, chucking memory (low-power) above high power logic die.

stacking logic chips is hard because they have to dissipate a lot of power, and stacking them multiplies your power density (which is already very high for the logic die, generally) by the number dies you stack~effectively. Most of the progress on these sorts of things have just been stacking layer on layer of memory on a single logic die.

It looks like they are folding other components other than memory onto the logic die which I haven't seen before, but this isn't cold fusion and even intel has thrusts doing this type of 3D integration.

thewileyone• 24 days ago

R&D is difficult and expensive which makes this "logic folding" more impressive. It might not have been a new idea but Huawei, against all the demonization against it over the last 10 years, is commercializing it and that's a huge achievement.

R&D is difficult and expensive which is why the US and Europe gives up on many cutting edge technologies and relies on the tried and true and discounting opportunities. This will be the end of their dominance.

throwaw122• 25 days ago

I wholeheartedly wish China achieves it sooner.

US sanctioning GPUs to China, then blocking access to latest SOTA models will impact everyone in the world negatively.

We need competition, Europe is not an option anymore, hopefully Chinese labs will keep open sourcing SOTA models

Based on the trend, if China wins, everyone benefits, if US wins, only Americans will benefit and everyone else will suffer

peter-m80• 25 days ago

the real question is "when?"

maxglute• 24 days ago

The question is can ASML and western semi keep up with PRC long term. Every western semi player is projected short 100k talent while PRC is only semi power on trend to produce enough IC talent for the entire supply chain, and surplus to seriously investigate multiple paths. I.e. west/ASML stuck on LPP EUV with seriously terminal economics, while PRC doing LPP, LDP, synchrotron, nanoimprint, FEL etc all of it, several branches of which could essentially instantly validate ASML model.

IAmBroom2• 23 days ago

These arguments always remind me of 1960s-1970s era spy movies, where Bad Guy has the secret design for SuperNewBig computer chip, which will tip the balance of power inevitably in his favor.

Meh. For a year or so, his computers will work a little faster. Unless they power an armageddon-device, it's just a short head-start in a long race.

Can China build its own ASML? NEVER! Western brains and economic greatness cannot be equalled!

Yes, China will catch up. It won't give them anything but a short lead.

Can China build its own ASML?

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