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.
> 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?
It doesn't mean absolutely everyone takes part, of course, but it does mean it's a 'thing' that people may take part in with support from many of those around them if they choose.
Looking at the inverse: If you're going against the cultural wind, you're just going to have a much harder time doing whatever it is.
It just seems like this must show up in outcomes, it would be strange if it didn't.
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.
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.
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?
What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)
The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along
So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.
Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20553/gross-domestic-expendit...
https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-...
And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.
But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.
And in fact this meme Chinese only copy is crap as I point out in my last paragraph. Over the centuries the Chinese were the first at quite a few things.
But the sentence says what it says.
The "bean counters" are under pressure just like everybody else. They didn't come up with their targets and incentives out of nowhere.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
They have done to the battery market exactly what Taiwan did to the chip market. You can buy an EV made anywhere the same way you can buy a laptop made anywhere. But guess where the chips and batteries were made.
They will be the first to sodium ion and solid state though.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/30/how-herbert-diess-zeng-...
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.
P.S. Can you usefully chirp an FEL? I don’t know whether the electron sources that would be used for EUV FELs can be re-tuned quickly enough, nor whether the magnet arrangements are conducive to perturbing the wavelength. But relativistic electron beams are weird and maybe it works fine. Of course, I also have no idea why you would want to chirp your lithography light source.
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.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
"Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
There's also risk in investing in very long-term things that may not pan out.
WAI, in other words
The only major example I can think of is Amazon dot com which famously reinvested all its profits into itself for well over a decade.
The fact that investors didn't punish Amazon dot com was seen as befuddling in the press.
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
No, I don't think this is true at all because you used the word "routinely". I would claim it is very rare.
I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.
It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
Some money is lost to push up this valuation or valuation based on some future sales, or market share or anything...
But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.
We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.
It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.
I would. It's showing the weaknesses and limitations of its ideology.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital.
So what?
> Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system.
The West is literally de-industrializing and can't seem to built shit except slowly and expensively. Industry after industry gets hollowed out as China takes the lead.
Do not make the mistake of reasoning about US vs China from the experience of US vs USSR. China doesn't have a command economy, outproduces the US, and controls many key industries. The US is resting on its laurels, and its people cope by thinking of the few industries where it's still ahead, but those are dwindling.
> The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital.
That's not truth, it's a dogmatic assumption.
China has been able to exploit a dogmatic belief in the free market to siphon the real capital out of the West and into itself (industry and know-how) in order to achieve dominance. The US elite is content to have paper. We'll see how that works out.
> We need to see how all of this plays out
If you're rooting for China. If you're rooting for the US, by then it will be too late to course correct.
Is it all being demolished, or is 95% of it being moved into?
Because all those ghost cities that China was building that the news kept bitching about... Are now all full.
Meanwhile, in the West, we have a housing shortage. Who looks the fool now...
Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.
Private ownership of means of production: On an atomic, legal level of course. But if point at an NVIDIA based compute rack at a US based random datacenter, can someone tell me actually who owns it? I am interested in the actual natural person who has an ownership share of this capital asset, not the myriads of layers of corporate and financial networks of equity delegations through investment banks, but the actual owner?
Profit oriented: Of course, it is said so. But do really companies, entrepreneurs do things to maximize the profits of the actual owners, shareholders? Are the executives and boards really that keen on putting forward the interest - of the previously referenced unknown - actual owner of the capital assets?
Free market based: This has also multiple sub-characteristics, but most importantly something about competition, or rather the lack of collusion and that economic actors (including consumers, (natural person) investors) are all fully informed. How much is this true in the West?
I think we are very much lost in labels.
The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this.
I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.
so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances).
The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper.
Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry.
Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
The US explicitly chose to be a service economy. China explicitly chose to be a mercantile economy.
The US can absolutely switch paths, it will just take a long time and will require pushing millions into poverty. But we're on track to do it.
US and China are on completely different stages of industrialization: The US had its massive boom of manufacturing almost a century ago, enriching its population massively. Those rich citizens make the same manufacturing uncompetitive today, because no one is going to work in a factory for $20k/year (median wage in urban China), when he can work for other "rich" people for more than twice as much.
Switching paths is not feasible for the US in the same way that it is not gonna be feasible for China to hold on to all its industry as wages rise: You can't compete globally at "poor people wages" while being "rich", as simple as that.
In other words: the US wants its workers assembling hamburgers, China wants its workers assembling drones.
And when there's a conflict, the US will lose because you can't win a war with hamburgers.
The only thing that the US is on track to is getting a taste of what real corruption feels like, enriching Trump's friends, and hollowing out its middle class.
You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.
This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.
The last 200 years has been an aberration and it is currently in the process of being corrected.
Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?
I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.
We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.
0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...
How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else.
Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal.
But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US.
It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
Nah.
He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.
He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.
Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...
Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!!
I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax.
This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
I bet China’s first priority when building semiconductors isn’t hiring lawyers.
People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.
We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
Good joke. Probably a couple of tech billionaires will eventually say something and then something will happen.
Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
You can expect to be able to buy exactly that many chinese GPU or neural processors.
A move like that will seriously hurt our ability to train and raise new software developers and the domestic game market.
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.
Imagine if in 2010 the USA had banned itself from using computer hardware more powerful than they had at the time. Where would they be in the AI race? That's the situation the USA is heading for.
It's just what they do as a nation.
Something to think about if considering the purchase of a DJI drone.
also, consider that a $50 smartphone can drive an ICBM.
We thought it was the coolest thing.
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.
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?
E: And state can, but I don't know if state generally willing/able to backstop companies to 50% margin long term. I can't think of any, maybe some major state oil. Nvidia/TSMC with $$$ margins getting some CHIPs injection really meant for bailing out broke ass Intel was already anomalous, and it was basically to bribe them to onshore production.
This tends towards the economic reality but it certainly does not match it.
The problem is not regulation, it is the lack of it: anti-monopolist practices and deregulation of the finance industry has led us to insane bubbles, dead markets and extreme wealth concentration. Any competition gets bought, crushed, or undercut via bankrolling. This is what you get when the 0.0001% gets to pull the strings again. Must watch (3 parts): https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
It’s literally state sponsored monopolies.
Also you take is highly simplistic. Even the small players are command and control. You’re likely just not aware how it works.
The current Chinese worries are about having too much competition rather than too little, Google "involution" to read about it.
What helped was the public outrage over the insane profits the American oligarchs reaped during WOI. This enabled Roosevelt during WOII to set a maximum profit margin for the oligarchy owned factories and fined those who evaded the law. It was a shock for the conservatives to see how the bureaucracy turned America's mediocre output around with a fast, efficient and lean production monster. The monopolists had to resort to propaganda, claiming the government's success as theirs, injecting the falsehoods we now all take for granted.
___
1. As an exercise, think what would be possible if all the cash piles didn't sit at big tech, but instead enabled competition. Meta isn't still more than a useless addiction factory.
Except the market pretty much can't do this with Nvidia. Nobody is showing any sign of catching up: it is entirely possible we are seeing a runaway train and without the intervention of a massive state like China to create a viable competitor, there will never be one.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
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.
Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
Mojo looked promising initially. The more details we got though, the more it became apparent that they weren't interested in actually competing with Nvidia. Mojo doesn't replace the majority of what CUDA does, it doesn't have any translation or interoperability with CUDA programs. It uses a proprietary compiler with a single implementation. They're not working in conjunction with any serious standardization orgs, they're reliant on C/C++ FFI for huge amounts of code and as far as I'm aware there's no SemVer of compute capability like CUDA offers. The more popular Mojo gets, the more entrenched Nvidia (and likely CUDA) will become. We need something more like OpenGL with mutual commitment from OEMs.
Lattner is an awesome dude, but Mojo is such a trend-chasing clusterfuck that I don't know what anyone sees in it. I'm worried that Apple's "fuck the dev experience" attitude rubbed off on Chris in the long run, and made him callous towards appeals to openness and industry-wide consortiums.
I can't claim to know more about GPU compilers than Lattner - but in this specific instance, I think Mojo fucked itself and is at the mercy of hardware vendors that don't care about it. CUDA, by comparison, is having zero expense spared in it's development at every layer of the stack. There is no comparison with Mojo, the project is doomed if they intend any real comparison with CUDA.
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.
Intermittent driver timeout or crash may be observed while playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370.)
Lower than expected performance may be observed in Delta Force on Radeon™ RX 7000 series graphics products.
Intermittent stutter may be observed while playing Marvel Rivals when AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 frame generation is enabled. "
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-no...
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.
If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
Seems like on hn a lot of people pay for the subscriptions.
I don't personally know a single person who pays for any type of llm subscription. I am a staff sw engineer, been doing this a long time.
I acknowledge this is an anecdote. I just happen to know a lot of people at a lot of different companies from my network. Nobody pays for any of this. My company has banned llms, even if I wanted to use one, I can't.
I actually even gave one a shot tonight. I asked for a list of repos I needed to clone to build a yocto image for an nxp board. This was the result:
mkdir -p sources && cd sources
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/meta-freescale
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
I then pointed out that three of those lines were useless and asked it to fix those lines. The result I got was even more hilarious, and just as useless.
Disclaimer: this was the "dive deeper" button on a google search. No idea what fucking model it tried to use.
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).
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
Edit: I meant ATI but I guess AMD bought ATI in 2006! I thought that happened in the 2010s for some reason.
>> 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.
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.
If Nvidia had infinite supply and infinite resources, they would absolutely continue doing consumer. There are constraints that prevent them from doing so at the typical volumes.
Giving up on consumer also means giving up on a gateway to more CUDA ecosystem users.
We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
Just further Western industrial policy failure.
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...
But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world.
Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and designers in production facilities is extremely valuable.
Remember Snowden.
But realistically, they'll just bring out the wrench[0].
People always seem to imagine tyranny worries about a standard of evidence. Tyranny has arrest quotas, evidence optional.
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.
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?
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
What do you mean by "The West"?
Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary. We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.
Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.
I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.
It's ironic that a lot of western domestic manufacturing takes place using machines that were engineered and manufactured in China.
Atleast as far as hours clocked in at work is concerned, no?
Unless you are talking about Israel :P
It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.
Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.
If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.
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?
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
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.
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.
people love to be reductionist... i wonder what aspects of a culture make everyone so black/white us/them ingroup/outgroup. Is it particular to the US, or like, is France the same way? Or Ghana? Or is it just human that everything is a war? Naqoyqattsi.
They might be, but if they plan on getting a factory running in 3 years, they're presumably planning on using what they purchased.
Once they break even they can overshoot into shocking new technology territory.
I think that both Germany and USSR were not in the least shocked ... just the USA had the resources to finish it.
Maybe it was because we had all those immigrants working on it (e.g. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann)!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Reunification with the mainland isn’t a completely unpopular idea in Taiwan. The economic ties are already extremely deep (largest trading partner by far).
Counts for nothing, these narratives are built on sand. Russians also saw Ukrainians as "brothers", as did South/North Koreans before the war, among countless other examples.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
Smuggling part is happening on the old machines before EUV. There's a lot of them available on the second hand market thanks to Europe and US keep shutting down their old fabs. I don't think any DUV machine is smuggled. Even if they physically smuggled one, you need a team of ASML engineers to set it up and calibrate. You can guess what ASML will do in this case.
By the way, let's don't forget: ASML doesn't have any problems with China. They are incredibly annoyed with US and Dutch governments. This is potentially the biggest market they are missing out. Even then, they won't tolerate a summugling operation.
The thing that helps prevent smuggling of ASML machines is that a) there are few of them (i.e., people would notice), b) it requires tremendous effort to move them at all, let alone without anyone noticing.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-all-its-sites-o...
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.
The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.
I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.
The US exerts sufficient control over ASML that this will not happen without NATO ending. And the end of NATO (which would be a geopolitical shift more profound than the Fall of the Berlin Wall) and a replacement with some Chinese EUV light source risks the scuttling of all ASML facilities and devices. This is vapor above a coffee cup.
To enable the whole thing to work you'd need the US to have shrunk to the equivalent of Canada in influence. I'm not saying that's impossible, but in that scenario, the Dutch might well be trying to keep Russians out of Amsterdam and the Turks out of Germany rather than trying to pull an IP heist on the Americans.
You can buy an e-book on Kindle and Amazon still controls what you do with it, right? ASML's ownership of Cymer is like that, except it's the US instead of Amazon.
Of course it does, that's why I wrote about export controls but the context is not current state of the world, but what OP wrote:
> If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.
And in this very different state of the world, export controls are worth the same as paper they were written on.
How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?
I don't personally understand why suitable EUV light sources are so hard to build, but evidently, they are. It sounds like a big deal if China is catching up in that area.
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.
That bit struck me as naive, given the instances of Americans who aren't Chinese nationals, or even ethnically Chinese at all, caught committing actual espionage on behalf of China.
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...
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.
> 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...
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
(For those confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Russian_annexation_of_Cri...)
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
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.
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.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.
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.
For me many Western politicians don't see past 5-10 years. Short-term China was Heaven (for big corp), so they used all the resources they had to justify what they did. Many called BS on that, but were treated like right wing, populists, old conservatives, naive, fear-mongering, etc. Almost a dejavu.
I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.
Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.
But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.
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.
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.
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 ... ...
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.
Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.
If you hate invasions so much, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
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
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.
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?
The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.
Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.
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.