ASML

Bloomberg reports Austria is pushing the EU to host Anthropic in response to US access curbs — the kind of relocation HN had been arguing was unrealistic.

An engineer from Stainless, the startup Anthropic acquired, notes Anthropic's European offices are sales, not engineering — the labs are in London and the US — while a VC in the thread reduced the whole 'why can't Europe build this' debate to one word: capital.

Nikkei's question is whether China can clone the world's most complex machine. Beijing's Big Fund Phase 3 put $48 billion behind the effort, yet China's own SMEE lithography tools still can't reliably hit even mid-range nodes, and one customer said a machine "still doesn't work properly" a year after delivery. A BofA analyst's timeline: 5, 10, or 15 years, and "highly unlikely" to match ASML.

The HN thread mostly answered "of course they can", then split on the real bottleneck. The harder counter wasn't about machines at all: ASML's moat is the partnership web (Zeiss, IMEC, the US Department of Energy), and the West is the side projected to be short 100,000 chip-talent workers.

IBM's new 'nanostack' stacks transistors vertically to claim 0.7nm, or '7 angstroms' — roughly twice the density of its 2021 2nm chip, with 50% more performance or 70% better efficiency.

But the number is marketing, not measurement: the smallest real features are around 5nm. As one engineer put it, the name scales better than the tech. And IBM has no production fabs — it paid GlobalFoundries $1.5B in 2014 to take them away.