They have to appease daddy T .Being seen in Washington as tough on China is good optics .
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- Thread starter bd popeye
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Their tactics are crude because the tactics were invented based on their own propensity for theft to cope with what China's actually doing, e.g. long term investment in education and infrastructure, which aren't crude and as such can't be acknowledged. Once they convinced themselves that's what China's doing, and with theft being a fundamental Europeans attribute, stealing Chinese assets becomes the obvious choice.
It's good that they do so, because it's not in China's interest for the west to be competent.
Rare-earth is not lithography equipment that is super expensive and only a few items are sold per year. They are not even AI Chips, which are being smuggled by the 100s of thousands. For each ASML machine costing a few 100 million, you probably only need maybe 100 KG worth of Magnets. I am sure they will be able to source it, whether legally through some producers outside China or illegally through smuggling.
The rare-earth ban is mainly bad for large scale manufacturing industry. Chip production? Not so much. So, lets not get carried away about the Awesome superpower of the rare-earth controls. They are very impactful but not in these kinds of niche sectors.
Exactly this, why would China invest into the EU with all risk associated with those investments. While they can invest in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines(when relationships improve), Thailand, India(when relationship improve) etc. Those are all close by countries, lower risk profiles to point it's all manageable and bigger markets as in more buyers.
Do you know how many magnetic wafer stage manufacturers there are and the cost of one? You can ask Chat GPT. These are among the most expensive parts of a EUV tool.
Let me give you an idea of how expensive they are.
A 1 axis mechanical wafer stage costs 24k USD.
What do you think a 3 axis (minimum) vacuum compatible magnetic wafer stage costs?
100 kg of magnets - but it doesn't work without them. So what's the real value?
How much you need is the key right? Preventing smuggling or even legal purchase of thousand ton of Magnets is possible. But not if its 2-3 tons for the entire year that ASML might need. Moreover, ASML is likely not even buying these magnets directly, ASML is an assembler of other components/motors thing like that. ASML has thousands of suppliers and these suppliers are supplying to thousands of other applications. So, its not possible to target just ASML and say, don't sell this motor to ASML.
Even if China did a 100% ban of rare-earth exports to Netherlands, they still won't be able to prevent ASML production because of how little they need per machine and so few machines they make per year. Its not like cars which are produced by the millions.
well this is for domestic consumption. bob and joe might not give a shit about rare earths and ai, heck they might even hate it, but everyone can come to the table for cooking oil.
The US produces soybeans but does not crush them to make oil. They sell them to China in bulk. So the US is paying China to crush their own soybeans to get oil.
Pretty pathetic.
Did you know India could buy soybean oil from the US but not the beans themselves? Coz those beans are GMO. Import into India is forbidden to prevent crop contamination but the oil would be fine.
Except the US cannot crush beans to extract oil. And India won't allow the import of whole beans to be crushed in their facilities.
I suspect most magnets by weight are for windmills and EVs. It is probably easy to redirect some material from those to ASML or the MIC. China needs to watch out.
Likely, yes