China bought 41% of ASML's machines in 2024, partly to take them apart (nikkei.shorthandstories.com)
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.
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