X-Alternative

This is an incredible story by Reuters: they reveal that China now has a working EUV lithography machine prototype, which makes China the only country in the world to have succeeded at replicating the ASML technology, years earlier than anticipated. The machine apparently "fills nearly an entire factory floor". It's operational and successfully generates extreme ultraviolet light (what "EUV" stands for), but has not yet produced working chips. The objective for the latter is 2028, which is a crazy fast timeline: ASML took 18 years to go from prototype to machines that could produce commercially-available chips, China aims to do it in 3. The security measures around the project look insane. The employees work under fake identities so they don't know each other's real names. They work inside secure facilities where "no one outside the compound could know what they were building - or that they were there at all". They're divided in "teams who are kept isolated from each other to protect the confidentiality of the project," where "they don't know what the other teams work on." For foreign employees, China exceptionally gave them Chinese passports and allowed them to maintain dual citizenship, which is normally forbidden under Chinese law. This seems to be because some of the employees are former ASML workers such as Lin Nan, ASML's former head of light source technology (scmp.com/news/china/sci…), who would be less vulnerable to Western sanctions under Chinese citizenship. The salaries offered are apparently "uncapped" with "signing bonuses that started at 3 million to 5 million yuan" and "home-purchase subsidies". This all means that we're looking, within a few years, at yet another self-inflicted wound by the West: the development, because of sanctions, of a serious competitor for Europe's most successful technology company (one of our very rare ones!). And the worst part, for Europe, is that these sanctions weren't even initiated by us nor serve our interests: we just followed Washington's lead as usual, suffering the costs while getting no obvious benefit out of it. Quite the contrary in fact as all its doing is replacing a massive customer with a massive future competitor. We, again, let ourselves be the chessboard on which others play. We just absorb the damage from both sides and have no voice in the game. Link to the story: reuters.com/world/china/ho…