There's no way to paint this situation as one where getting more ASML would be helpful to China. The question is simple: do you treat drug withdrawal by putting the patient on more drugs, especially when the patient is making visible progress against addiction?
Chinese fabs are already used to ASML DUV machines and we see machines stockpiled in China for future expansion.
There's a countdown on that clock and that's the urgency. When that countdown stops or goes back up, people relax.
But all the Chinese fabs know that even if they get continued access to ASML DUV machines, there's no guarantee that they won't be sanctioned. At a minimum, we will still see Huawei and SMIC continue to work with the manufacturers to improve domestic DUV machines.
You'd be surprised at corporate desperation and greed. Desperation drove them to make the fastest progress on the planet at the most difficult technology there is. Greed will make them put that project on the backburner to chase easy fast profits now with ASML's machines.
My guess is that domestic DUV machines are currently useable, but they still need a few years to work out the bugs, scale up production, and come up with a more polished version.
Good. That means that if we use them for everything, they debug faster. You wanna learn a language in no time, put yourself in a society where no one speaks your native tongue. If we put ASML as the primary use and our native machines as a backup project, they debug slower, so slow that they can fall behind, become hopeless, and discarded. Don't forget, every dollar you pay ASML is money injected into their system to make them innovate faster and that's a dollar taken away from Chinese systems' developmental funds. It's double trouble to buy ASML when you have any local machines that are usable at all.
And if EUV machines become available today? I do think Chinese fabs should buy as many as they need.
As I said above, corporate greed needs to be stopped and desperation needs to continue in pursuit of our own indigenous line. There is no half-assing it.
That doesn't stop Huawei or SMIC trying to get domestic EUV machines ready, as they know more sanctions are coming.
Yeah, but how desperate and how fast? There is no possible way that the same amount of energy gets put into domestic lithography after foreign ones get injected, even though they say they will at first. The best way, the fastest way, is to keep Chinese lithography at the state of fighting with one's back to a cliff/river. The Manhattan Project would have been heavily delayed (though nuclear weapons research would still continue slower) if WWII turned into a negotiation and the front lines cooled. This is China's Manhattan Project. Hostilities must remain until we achieve total victory.
