@manatee988 bro with the incoming recession there is a major rethink regarding expansion among the FAB makers.
Hoping the US chip funding fails seems like a bad foundation for making trade policy like banning ASML. The US Chip Bill has passed the senate recently.
@manatee988 bro at $52 billion with majority going to Intel, god help America.
Huawei joint venture with ICRD has several thousands wafer per month productivity in 2021. It is an 14nm de-Americanized production line.
If you sell a tool cheaper than a competitor but your tool is not as productive as your competitor’s tool the buyer actually loses money in their operations using your tool over a competitor’s tool. For products that are used to make things productivity to cost ratio, not purchasing price, is what matters for effective competition. In a normal situation where ASML is allowed to sell their instruments to China, China’s domestically made instruments only have an edge in purchasing price if the difference in price also makes a difference in total operation costs. So China’s tools have to become close to the same in productivity first. And that’s not just in figures like wafers per hour, but also in reliability and servicing costs.
The issue isn’t whether China should ban ASML, but whether ASML can deliver product and the requisite servicing that comes with a purchase. If ASML is unable to because of geopolitical factors, then it’s effectively no different than if China were to ban them. I think in a world without these geopolitical pressures there is absolutely no reason why Chinese fabs shouldn’t be doing business with ASML. But that doesn’t seem to be the world we live in today, and trying to reason away why ASML should be allowed to be a full participant in the Chinese market is dancing around a practical reality that isn’t trending in a direction that supports the merits of the argument. The question that should be asked isn’t whether China should accept ASML as a participant in its domestic semis industry, but can ASML and more broadly the Dutch government be trusted to be a reliable and good faith actor for Chinese fabs. The economic logic should point to yes, but the political logic of the day isn’t aligning with that economic logic at all. Opening market access to foreign competition isn’t itself necessarily a bad thing so long as the spirit of mutual benefit is maintained. But it becomes a problem when the relationship is weaponized by one actor against another.
In this case the real problem isn’t ASML, but the Dutch and US government. But if ASML can’t overcome the restrictions with doing business presented by their and the US government, then what good is it to Chinese fabs to absolve ASML of blame?