China’s imports of Dutch lithography machines have surged this year, with the first seven months already surpassing ASML Holding’s previous forecast for 2023 sales to China, according to a new report, as Chinese firms stock up on the equipment ahead of new export curbs.
From January to July, Chinese imports of Dutch-made lithography machines, nearly all from chip equipment giant ASML, grew 64.8 per cent year on year to US$2.58 billion, Chinese semiconductor industry consultancy JW Insights said in a report published on Friday, citing China customs data.
In January, ASML projected that its sales to China this year would remain steady at about 2.2 billion euros (US$2.36 billion), or 14 per cent of its total annual revenue.
In July, China imported US$626 million worth of lithography machines from the Netherlands, nearly eight times larger than the same month last year, according to the report.
ASML has a near monopoly on the world’s most advanced lithography machines, which are required for the production of cutting-edge chips. Under US pressure, the company has cut off exports of its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems to China.
Why did they allow them to buy those machines? Wasn’t this part of the embargo?
Looks like a very stupid loophole to leave
China can make the machines they’re buying. The tech isn’t too hard.
EUV on the other hand needed several billions of dollars, years of research, and three US Department of Energy Labs to develop, then investment in optics from the EU.
The US asked the Dutch government to stop selling China tech that the US government licensed to them.
ASML had to put in a decades of r&d to make EUV work too. It wasn’t like they could just go over the research and start building. So yeah, it’s difficult.
The embargo only covered EUV IIUC.
EUV is the tech that the latest Apple and Intel chips are using.
DUV is the older tech that China is buying.
It is not an American company. The US asked the Netherlands to ban it and they have now restricted it.
This is a big deal. ASML is one of the most bleeding edge companies that almost no one has ever heard of. Their equipment should be kept out of Red China as much as possible.
ASML (Netherlands) and TSMC (Taiwan) may be the two most important companies in the global electronics supply chain.
China is certainly looking to bolster their own competition in this space. But that hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure the CCP is very concerned about this regulation. If they’re not, they should be.
With the kind of long-term thinking that China tends to do, I have little doubt that they know they need to develop their own tech. By limiting their access now, that would probably keep Chinaa decade or maybe even two behind the bleeding edge tech that ASML or TSMC are producing. And I tell you right now that if a war ever did break out between China and Taiwan, gaining access to TSMC would be one of the mainland China’s prime targets to take over.
gaining access to TSMC would be one of the mainland China’s prime targets to take over.
They will never get them in an operational state. It is not just the fabs, which I doubt will survive the invasion but the hundreds of engineers needed to run them.
China does so little long term planning. It’s beholden to the short term emotional tantrums/wolf warrior diplomacy of its leadership.
I can’t agree with that at all.
Their planning when it comes to their car industry is a perfect example of them thinking long term. Right now they are the leaders in EVs. Their domestic car industry is shockingly advanced in terms of quality and design and tech. But that wasn’t the case some 25 years ago when they were a good 50+ years behind Western countries.
They implemented a plan which forced foreign carmakers to partner with Chinese companies if they wanted to sell within the country. They were using their massive scale to push these partnerships, and the short term thinking kf most Western companies made them fall for it. So with those partnerships technology and know-how was shared with Chinese companies. This is the kind of know-how that companies usually keep as secret as possible because of how important it is - IP is probably one of the most important things to modern manufacturing companies. These Western companies were essentially training their long term replacements all so they could sell a few thousand more cars per year in the short term.
And in many ways that is exactly what is happening right now - there is a big push in China recentky to support domestic brands. Sales for foreign makes is dropping and the Chinese are buying BYDs and Geelys. These Chinese brands have gotten so good, in fact, that they are now exporting their EVs to Europe and elsewhere.
Why?
Because they make the equipment that make the chips that EVERYTHING in our modern world runs on. I’m only slightly exaggerating that statement. If you are tech savvy and understand the microscopic scale that chips have moved to, well ASML and only like one other company (TSMC) are making the equipment to be able to allow these ever-smaller processes even possible.
Yeah, but why is it bad to have more manufacturers of chips?
Are we going to play the “nothing wrong with China” angle here?
No, I’m playing the “I’d love to get cheap hardware thanks to increased competition in the market” angle. You, on the other hand, are playing the “CHINA BAD” angle.
Because China is bad. This is not an argument.
Yeah it’s an opinion
The silver lining is that sooner or later China will develop their own machines and we will all have 50 bucks Ryzen 9 chips on AliExpress.
You know nothing.
You can’t run a website, any website, in china without a license from the government that is closely monitored.
They’ll make cpus that only work if they dial home and confirm your social computing license.
China does the police state like nobody else on the planet.
Well, I can, at least, choose who will spy on me. It’s either the US or the Chinese, everyone should try and find out which one is the lesser evil in their particular country and position.
Where did you get the idea that you get to choose?
Uhhh, you say that like IME and PSP and project pluton don’t exist.
They exist.
When’s the last time they shut your internet off for you because you were browsing an unapproved site?
Now ask someone from the mainland.
I’ve got news for you: companies like Intel already install backdoors for western government to use.
I’m well aware.
Note how you don’t have to worry about them.
China won’t be like that, because they aren’t like that for anything else. It’s a prison masquerading as a country.
You are wrong about that, if anyone is a prison it is the US, the country with the largest prison population in the world.
If China is a prison masquerading as a country, what does that make the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, not just per capita but in total number (even with a much lower total population than China)?
Better.
Because we usually let people out.
The exact numbers of people executed in China is classified as a state secret; occasionally death penalty cases are posted publicly by the judiciary, as in certain high-profile cases. One such example was the execution of former State Food and Drug Administration director Zheng Xiaoyu, which was confirmed by both state television and the official Xinhua News Agency. Other media, such as Internet message boards, have become outlets for confirming death penalty cases usually after a sentence has been carried out.
Because of the inaccessibility to official statistics of the number of executions that occur within the death penalty system, academic researchers must use data compiled by NGOs such as Amnesty International, which is the most cited source of reports regarding rates of execution statistics. In 2009, Amnesty International counted 1718 executions as having taken place during 2008 (which equates to 0.0001%, or 1 in 1,000,000 of the Chinese population), based on all information available. Amnesty International believed that the total figure was likely to be much higher. According to “The Death Penalty in China: Reforms and Its Future”, “it also represents the most conservative estimate of death sentences and executions in China due to the following accounting rules: 1) when there is doubt of accuracy, figures were excluded; 2) where two conflicting reports existed, the lower figure was used; 3) when a combined figure of death sentences and prison sentences was given, only one death sentence was recorded; and 4) when a group was sentenced to death, only one sentence was entered.”
Don’t bother, China is an evil country that’s indefensible, you can whatabout the US all you like, we have our problems, but we can also actually talk about them.
Yeah, because the US doesn’t have the death penalty at all. Are you joking?
Fucking tankies defending the CCP executing people in secret.
If only it were so easy. The competition would’ve kept the prices down from both Nvidia and AMD, and we wouldn’t be looking at high end GPUs for $1500.
I heard the same argument from IBM and HP when they started producing Servers, desktop computers and laptops, amongst many industries. With the new laws affecting the procurement of high end chips for China the motivation is very big to develop their own high end chip manufacturing machines.
lol
lmao
How? China is going the riscV way because the design is open source
