If thats the case, then I presume the increased import value is mostly coming from asml. Will be interesting when their q4 earnings come out. I am anticipating more china deliveries.
Guaranteed. For instance, Ra.y.the.on chip fabs aren't listed, but they have lots of facilities that look suspiciously like chip fabs, also working on older nodes like 150 mm wafer, 180 nm process.
PLA have own autonomous fab but as you know all heavy basic industries still uses older nodes like 90nm/44nm so defense industry is no exception. except some latest Ai related weapons.
I Think they have been pattering chips 250nm to 45nm using low volume immersion and EUV lithography, apart from using lithography machines from CETC and SMEE for quite some time for their weapon and space programs. CETC alone can produce enough processing tools to solve the most of the chips needs of the PLA and China space programs.
graphene is thin but the Z dimension isn't the limiting factor for electronics as your interconnects take up far more vertical space than the transistors themselves. Otherwise, graphene has a bandgap of 0 and is more like a semimetal than a semiconductor. it is likely to be more useful for chemical or mechanical properties than for electronic.
Then how do explain how the US first just banned chips from being sold to China? They thought that was enough. Then reports came out from the non-Western media that China was on it's way to domestic production and only until then the US started banning equipment to make chips. If the US knows everything before the media then they should've banned the tools to make chips from the first place.