Huawei

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.

Zimmermann beat the 1990s arms-export case by publishing PGP source as a printed book. The article asks if the same futility applies to a model Anthropic was ordered to restrict within 90 minutes.

The correction: PGP ran on any PC. A hosted model's dependence on centralized compute is exactly what makes export control bite.