ASML won an $845 million judgment in 2019 against a former Chinese engineer accused of stealing trade secrets, but the defendant filed for bankruptcy and continues to operate in Beijing with Chinese government support, according to court documents.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Word? That's actually huge news. Everyone currently has to get there lithography equipment of this kind from ASML and the price is genuinely hard to fathom. Chinese competition would be a potentially world changing development.
imagine they turn the $250 million lithography machines into $250 lithography machines
and then you manufacture slightly different specs using similar techniques: use vapor deposition and smart creating actual smart materials, laid down molecule by molecule. (monocrystalline metals, printing chips inside materails to create basically synthetic "skin", real sci fi shit)
imagine if that process were as cheap as making sheets of plastic
hahahaha a chip fab localized entirely in my kitchen, and china's enabling it 
It would be amazing if this ultimately drove chip prices down
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said that China would need "many, many years" to develop such technology
ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) is a crucial Dutch multinational company that develops and manufactures photolithography systems, essential for mass-producing the world's most advanced microchips
I'd lose my job if I had a forecasting miss that bad 
The white supremacy of the west rarely shines brighter than in prognostications like this. China is a highly industrialized country with something like twice the population of the US and Europe combined. The ONLY WAY you could think they won't triumph in research, production, and cultural output is if you think they are genetically inferior or something. They are GOING to make the chips. It is going to take them LESS TIME to develop the process than it took you, and they are going to be able to make MORE of them.
Everyone dunks on Matt Yglesias for his "one billion Americans" thing, but that impossible fantasy universe conjured in his mind palace is the only place where China is incapable of catching up to the West.
Even when China does something unequivocally good, the west still has to frame it as bad by comparing it to the Manhattan project and imply it will cause massive destruction.
by comparing it to the Manhattan project and imply it will cause massive destruction
"These dastardly duplicitous Chaineeeeeeeeezzz might do something like the horrible thing we're incredibly proud of doing!" (Narrator: they will not.)
The Chinese are playing Europa Universalis V