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?
Lithography machines are not drugs, they are tools.
There's a countdown on that clock and that's the urgency. When that countdown stops or goes back up, people relax.
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.
That is not the mentality at SMIC or Huawei. These companies expect technology development to be difficult and time-consuming.
So why do they continue doing it?
They know that there are so many competitors going the easy route on technology, which means barely any profits.
But if they master a difficult technology, there are no other competitors and they get to charge 100%+ profit margins.
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.
If ASML DUV machines are unbanned, I don't see it affecting the speed that domestic lithography machines get debugged.
Those domestic machines are already being used in production fabs at 3? companies.
And I expect there is already a large list of improvements being worked upon for the next version, but they need time to implement and then test.
My understanding is that additional financing or personnel, will not speed up the process.
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As for ASML EUV machines, if China were able to acquire them, my guess is that this will speed up with development process of the Chinese version(s). There will be a working machine to examine and understand.
Remember that ASML sells EUV machines with something like a 100% profit margin.
So if you can develop and sell EUV machines you too can start making 100% profit margins.
