HN Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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

Reverse-engineered is a nice way of writing stole.

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 ... ...

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.

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".

archive link??

> 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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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

"the people said"

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.

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.

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.

This article is more skeptical:

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

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"?