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86% of chips are still at 28nm... that's why China is not in a hurry, they do it because of their chip environment, not racing according to technology...
Actually China
is in hurry, as it should be because it's a race against time.
US will never stop.
After they will successfully ban DUV, they will move forward to ban any kind of Western of equipment: once US companies do not sell in China anymore, even the last reason to hold back with bans will vanish and they will go full decoupling. History taught us many times that
US startegy is always very simple and straightforward: they don't indulge in nuances or subtleties. Their strategy is always brute-force: There's one thing I don't like? I kill it.
I agree with
@BoraTas here, EU will never retaliate. The strategy of Europe is to slowdown and water down as much as they can. Europe's goal is to buy time....and this goes at advantage of China. too.
But once US will enforce the ban, Europe will not retaliate, and ASML will be forced to comply. This has nothing to do with what is legal or what is fair. This is pure power-play.
TSMC future is bound to US, they will depend more and more on US. TSMC will became a kind of US company, maybe not formally, but de facto. They will lose any strategic independence. The reason for TSMC to build a 3nm fab in US (people included) seems to be a strong push by Apple that does not want its most critical supply chain to depend on a shaky, small island. US and Intel will harvest TSMC fully.
China should just
"surf" the decoupling wave, remaining always a bit ahead of the latest ban, be always a bit faster in localizing than US is in banning, so that the wave does not overwhelm them.
In hindsight, I can see two big miscalculations.
(1) China relied too much on businesses to go their way. But companies follow their rules, that are business rules, not geopolitical rules. And (2) leaving localization of lithography machine to a small and resources limited company like SMEE has been a mistake. SMEE developed some machine
already ten years ago, but when these machines did not materialize in volume production, this should have rang an alarm bell, that didn't ring until very recently. China has a huge
, with tens of thousands of scientist and researchers. They underestimated the problem and the complexity of a litho machine and now China found itself relying on a small and sovereignty-limited European state, which is trying its best to resist the tiger. China should not find itself hoping in Dutch government!
...but in hindsight everything is very easy.