They were always going to try to in-house chip making - it's a huge point of geopolitical risk for them. Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down.

Sanctions on letting them buy chips 1. reduced available R&D money for US competitors by reducing their revenue and 2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity.

If you want to see effective de-industrialization, look at what happens to US industry when China applies the opposite of sanctions (subsidies).

Adam Smith figured out that mercantilism is inherently self-defeating over two hundred years ago. Maybe nation-states will catch up in the next few centuries.

>2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity.

The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. The Western sanctions had almost 0 bearing on accelerating local chip production, but it did do a GREAT job of limiting their ability to buy the hardware required for advanced fabrication.

You also seem to have a belief that a "monopoly" in China is anything remotely like the West. It's not a free market, if a company in China tries to gouge the market or take it in a direction that's not approved at the expense of what the party wants, their executive leadership will quickly find themselves on the outside looking in (if they're lucky) or sitting in a jail cell if they aren't. See: Jack Ma

Semiconductors were core to the "Made in China" strategy the party was pushing in 2014...

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insig...

> The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least.

Whatever encouragement or pressure the Chinese government was applying was insufficient to get manufacturers like Huawei to switch to domestic suppliers. Chinese companies still worked with established companies like TSMC, until forced by US sanctions to switch to worse domestic alternatives.

If sanctions are so effective the CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods.

> CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods.

They could, but a domestic trade sanction, just like foreign sanctions, would guarantee at least near-term damage to Chinese companies.

Domestically, Beijing would be seen as the responsible party for the resulting economic damage, causing resentment towards the government, with no actual guarantee of self sufficiency. Companies, in general, do not care about having a domestic supply chain; they want to increase profits.

Internationally, other countries would also see China as the initiator of the conflict, and those that are negatively affected may want to respond with sanctions of their own, escalating it beyond what Beijing intended.

The risk analysis is different between foreign sanctions and domestic sanctions. In the end, the Chinese government was not prepared to take that risk, but the American government was.

I have some good news - you suggest that the Party will step in if there is gouging or an independent direction being taken - that is to the advantage of China's competition.

One of the reasons groups like the USSR or Serious Communist China ended with everyone starving is that there is literally no known method to determine the correct price without mass signalling through a free market. Ditto what direction "should" be taken - the only known method is 10s of companies (ideally with funding weighted by what clever investors think is likely to work) where 9s of them fail and a selection succeed.

China isn't getting where they are because the party is helping. If anything it is the opposite, the party must have some capitalist incubators where they are holding themselves back from interfering all that much, otherwise the whole thing will collapse at some point because some bureaucrat refuses to believe prices were set too low until the shortages starve millions to death.

> Serious Communist China ended with everyone starving

This is certainly a claim, let's see how it stands up against the historical record (as from wiki): 1961: Last famine in the PRC 1966: Start of the Cultural Revolution 1976: Mao dies

I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling these, but if you've got some arguments explaining why the Cultural Revolution was after the end of "Serious Communist China" I'd be interested.

I agree. Communes were only privatised in the early 1980s, and I think that is a better marker for the end of communism in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste...

> One of the reasons groups like the USSR

The 'USSR' starved in the 90s after the fall of communism.

> Serious Communist China ended with everyone starving

Oh this nonsense. Serious Communist China had to deal with nuclear threats from both the US and the USSR. Serious communist china tok a back water colonized nation to a nuclear power within a single generation.

> there is literally no known method to determine the correct price without mass signalling through a free market.

You have it backwards. 'Free markets' led to 'starvation'. That's why we, in the US, have farm subsidies. A form of 'price control' along with many other measures. There is no nation ( especially a major ) on earth that has a 'free market'. There was also never a time when we had 'free trade' either. I'll let you figure that one out by yourself.

Every industry, from housing to oil, has price controls on them. It's all a matter of the degree and levers used.

The same idiots who praise government subsidies to build up our own chip industry are whining about 'price controls'.

See, policy like this I wish we had in the U.S., where the government controls industry, not the other way around.

China is still a few decades from commercially viable high end semiconductors. Yes, they can subsidize poor yields, but it doesn’t really bring them closer to figuring out the problem (they basically need to experiment a lot, and that will take time even if the money is there). China was always going to do this, they announced they were going to pour billions into semiconductors and modern jet turbines more than a decade ago. The trick is ensuring the money isn’t siphoned off to corruption.

Out of curiosity what’s stopping them cloning existing processes and technology like they do for everything else?

The tooling is ultra specialized and requires whole teams of highly skilled techs to assemble and calibrate. That's like half the cost involved, and the crews running the lines don't know much about how it works, they don't need to. If something goes wrong, they have service contracts.

So China can glean some of the process, but, because the design, assembly, and setup of the machines is done by western contractors, they're effectively locked out of 'the hard part'. Not to say they can't learn it, it's just not nearly as trivial as the rest of the things they clone.

Also worth noting that, many of the chinese clones are made in the same plants as the orignals, sometimes in parallel to the originals as to benefit from existing successful processes that were already in place, but using cheaper materials, less QC, different branding, etc.

It's actually quite impressive engineering really, they can often reduce part count and cost significantly while shipping a functional, albeit inferior, product. Chip fabs don't work in that model though, so, that presents an additional difficulty.

Reading Chris Miller's Chip War allowed me to realise how mind-bogglingly complicated the chip making process is.

The processes being hard to just clone, involving a lot of detailed expertise and being extremely sensitive to minute differences.

The West is able to lean on existing knowledge Intel has from running its own fabs in the US and the knowledge of ASML in the Netherlands who makes the machines.

Basically, they could get a machine and take it apart and figure out how it works, but that's meaningless if they don't understand how to make the stuff or how to keep it working well.

You don't think China already has folks working in TSMC fabs stealing IP?

If you believe that every Taiwanese engineer is rabidly anti-China then I have a vaccine I want to sell you.

It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel.

The only unknown is if there is will be hot war before they reach that inflection point.

The proof is in the pudding: they haven’t been able to replicate the process.

ASML tools are step 432 of 1234. There’s a whole fab built around it and a whole supplier ecosystem.

They will eventually succeed. That is obvious. High end chips have become existential in the modern world, especially now with AI, but have already been before that. When will they succeed is an open question as stealing the blueprint is absolutely not enough.

>China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In...

China has done what you said since 2005. it've been 20 years. is China leading the semis industry?

And finally, they will force their citizens to be happy.

>It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing

So, from 10,000ft I see what you're saying, and might even agree.

But what possesses someone to describe a people or country like this? We do the same with Russia; "other" them, like they have inherently "evil" traits. As if the US isn't above or involved in espionage.

I guess I'm confused how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can look at another country and think their people are fundamentally different. But god forbid you point that lens at the wrong group.

TSMC itself relies on lithography tooling coming from the west. I get people want the western world to be wrong here but they have the edge and China doesn’t. It’s going to take them awhile to catch up and by that point the west will have innovated in new ways. China overplayed its hand way to early and will suffer technologically for this.

it's not just ASML but its suppliers, like Zeiss that make some of the key components of chip-making tools that are extremely difficult to replicate

1) Industrial processes are stupidly hard to duplicate.

It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task.

2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress

American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.

A not insubstantial part of China's economy involves private corporations that compete with each other. The image of China as a command economy hasn't been true since Deng's reforms of the early 1980's. At the higher levels, sure, a lot of executives will be beholden to the CCP, but there are few places China places a single bet on a single state venture. Even their fully government-owned ventures are often companies that compete with each other or have corporate subsidiaries that compete with each other, and so while you might be tempted to just deliver good news, you face the risk that your competitors will deliver better news backed with results.

This is not an attempt to suggest China's government is good, because it's not, but it's also not a carbon copy of the worst sides of the Soviet Union - for all of Deng's brutal authoritarianism, he did recognise and address a lot of the worst mistakes of Mao and the Soviets in terms of the economy.

It also still doesn't necessarily mean employees in a private company in China will be as open to reporting issues as they might have been elsewhere, but it does mean there are incentives in play that at least make many executives want to put effort into identifying and addressing issues.

What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question. I’ve always been under the assumption they operate similarly.

As an employee of a corporation, I often speak my mind. The most I risk is being fired, and I believe I can find another job relatively easy. I sometimes do keep my mouth shut, because saying the truth would get me some sour looks, and I don't feel like dealing with that right now.

I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous.

From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.

Well there are a lot more corporations than dictators, and usually shit doesn't go sideways when a corporation falls.

Corporations usually can't just murder people in the streets if they don't like them.

>What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question.

/r/redditmoment

> China is still a few decades from commercially viable high end semiconductors.

I'm going to set a reminder to check in on this comment in three years to see how it has aged. My guess is, very poorly.

Just just look at seanmcdirmid's submission and post history. Shitting on China is what this account all about.

It's a total coincidence it has a ton of karma, too. Yup

Unlike most HN posters, I believe Sean lives (or at least lived) in China and thus has much clearer view of what's happening on the ground there.

> in China

I believe in Hong Kong instead. And thus has so many prejudices.

I lived in Beijing for 9 years. You know you are doing something right when the pro Chinese crowd calls you anti Chinese and the anti Chinese crowd calls you pro Chinese.

Personal attacks, such as you posted in this thread, aren't allowed on HN and will get you banned here. I don't want to ban you, so please don't do this again. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

It's of course difficult to remain respectful to other people when their views are remote from yours. The temptation is strong to think that they can't possibly be reasonable or fair, they must be in bad faith, etc. But after many years of moderating these disputes I can tell you that most of these perceptions are mistaken—what's really going on is that people have such different backgrounds that it's hard for them to relate to each other.

I was called a "pro Chinese crowd" for urging people to check this account's history, and you are threatening me with ban for personal attacks.

Do what you have to do.

Those are separate issues. We need users, including you, to follow HN's rules regardless of what other people are up to. The way you attacked seanmcdirmid in this thread was unacceptable and obviously against the rules.

At the same time, users aren't allowed to accuse each other of being shills, etc. - this too is well-established and also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you feel that users are breaking the rules you're welcome to flag the comments or to let us know at [email protected] but responding by breaking the rules yourself is not ok.

I heard that five and ten years ago so I’m not really worried (or if you mean china will always be three years away from commercially viable high end chips?).

In fairness, a lack of sanctions an also accelerate the industrial progress of rivals.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had close partnerships with Detroit auto makers that helped their industry.

The inherently parasitic, extractive elite in every empire so far loved mercantilism though, it appeals to the centralization focused, extractive, landlording mindset. China is trying to be as mercantilistic as possible (buy raw goods everywhere, ship only final products) and has none of the free trade idealism of the us. Which is one of the reasons the belt and road initivative is already collapsing.

I'm starting to think the US has little free trade idealism left.

The empire, the external face-hugger to any country, eats it all after a while, turning it into giant estates ala rome, with slaves and no middle class - with hired mercenaries for troops.

>they were effective in their goals and slowed China down

I believe that, unfortunately, the US has a much lesser grip on the global economy nowadays. So, these kinds of sanctions only slow them down (the US), while other economies benefit immensely, even China itself.

i.e. there will always be a buyer for a billion surplus chips in the market.

I am not seeing it. Either I am blind or we are seeing two different things? China sky-rocketed since the pandemic. They had a rough lock-down but there is something strange brewing there: Their tech/quality sector is releasing stuff at record speed (cars, phones, chips, etc..), their exports have boomed and even in this recent downturn seems to have stabilized, their "green" transition is happening at an unbelievable speed (look for China solar installation for last year), they continue to pump highways, HS rail, metros, airports at mind-boggling quantities, etc...

I am afraid the train left the station, or more like the rocket has launched already. I don't think the sanctions are going to make that big of an effect and if anything, they might come to bite the US back than anything else.

The infrastructure spending is indeed mind boggling, but I have the feeling similar to their real estate glut that they are building too low quality and are making a grave mistake in this because they will be stuck with this infrastructure for the next decades (comparable with how the US is stuck with its aging airports, highways and congress centers).

The public infrastructure (especially the newer one) is actually quite decent even by Western standards. The private buildings are not, at least the old ones (actually they are quite bad). The Chinese government recently banned high-rises because of this. Many of these buildings are now a liability to the public.

The sanctions are making a huge impact - chip making is more complex than almost any other current industry. I don't think sanctions will stop them from achieving their goal, but it will push them back from their goal of independence by about a decade.

Who knows if it comes back to bite the US. If I were China, I'd remember how the US treated them. I don't know.

I agree they were always going to try it, but the point is prioritization. All the sanctions did is bump it up on the prioritization list alot. So for instance in 2011 we passed an act banning China from the ISS. The argument was that they had nothing to offer, and implicitly that they'd just steal everything. 10 years later they've created, launched and manned their own space station, have carried out the only sample return from the Moon since 1972, and in general have one of the most advanced space programs on the planet.

Had we continued to collaborate with China in space, it's likely that most of these developments would have happened at a much slower pace, simply because they'd have had a lower overall priority. Sanctions, in general, are just a very poor weapon that increasingly obviously seem at least as likely to hurt the sanctioner as the sanctioned.

> Had we continued to collaborate

And the West would have had access to the same tech. The issue with putting a wall between yourself and the biggest manufacturing hub on the planet is that the well manufactured stuff might not be on your side of the wall.

do you know what caused golden space age in 60's ??? because American don't want lose to USSR

the world need strong rival like China to challenge western hegemony. that's why we have Artemis now, if China still in backwater like in 60's, we would not have project Artemis

>Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down.

What goal is that again? China is down to 5-7nm chips in practically no time which is more than enough for virtually every industrial and military application (the latter being the ostensible target of sanctions).

Huawei is even shipping phones now again on domestic supply chains. Pretty much the only thing the sanction have achieved is what, that Chinese gamers can't play Cyberpunk 2077 at max graphic settings? The irony is that cutting edge chips are predominantly used in sectors that China itself regulates to hell already. If you're concerned with China's generative AI advances you could have spared yourself the sanctions because so is the Chinese government

It's a margins game, now. West is still ahead. Won't last forever, but it will for a few years more, at least.

They always wanted to, but Chinese companies didn't cooperate because market incentives were lacking. Chinese fabs wanted to buy the best international equipment and shunned Chinese toolmakers. Chinese toolmakers never had a chance to break through to large market share. Until now: the sanctions gave toolmakers a captive market.

Chinese toolmakers sucked because they didn't have market share and lacked practice. With a captive market, they finally have customers to practice on. This learning-by-doing cycle is what allows them to rapidly improve their quality, something they couldn't do before.

The sanctions hurt short-term, but also gave them a long-term opportunity which they didn't have before.

It's not going to change much. Most ICs don't need or benefit from 2nm features. It's only value in the West is in boosting yield of high profit margin VLSI devices where it makes sense to air freight them to SZ for assembly. Those represent a tiny slice of the semiconductor market. Cheap jellybean semiconductors will stay in SEA close to their final assembly point since their dice are already tiny and you can't squeeze more parts out of a wafer without compromising on specs.

It seems quite early to evaluate if they are making any progress, if the goal is to catch up to, say, ASML.

They’re at 7nm now. Working towards 5nm. Yields leave much to be desired, but in the absence of other options cost doesn’t really matter. They’ll just have to make more wafers.

Where did you get the 7nm from?

Google “SMIC 7nm”.

Ultimately chokepoint still around creating litho/entire semi supply chain. which TBF is coming along. Big Fund was wasetful but did produce a lot of uncoordinated domestic players, US sanctions now forcing them to coordinate. PRC probably only actor with entire indigenous semi supply chain on the horizon. Fabbing leading edge chips was always the "easy" part, there's a reason TSMC/Samsung were willing to open fabs on mainland before US sanctions/CHIPs act without massive subsidies. Other east asians know Chinese work culture is compatible, they can work how they work and make what they make. Hence SMIC/Huawei can do 7nm and eventually 5nm with some TW/SKR training in years prior.

Semi is probably going to be less like oil and more like agriculture in coming years, it's just something strategic many govs have to subsidize.

Huawei apparently is making 7nm chips for their Mate 60 phone, but it’s apparently terrible, overheating issues, slow, high power consumption.

I think the power issue is because the camera and mic are on 24/7, they showed QR codes being read while the screen is off.

Gotta start somewhere. Everyone sucks at some process until they don't.

Sucking at a process is part of learning to do it better. But only if it is on a path of learning; practicing the skills that will be useful later.

They’ve stuck with DUV, which everybody else in the world decided was a dead end. Sticking with DUV may cause further progress to be impossible for all we know (maybe somebody should ask Intel). Going to EUV will require a different set of skills. They’ll have to replicate ASML’s machines to do so. Nobody else has figured it out. Their process on figuring out DUV tricks doesn’t tell us anything about their progress making that other type of machine.

I'm laughing at your comment because you seem to assume that China is doing nothing in EUV. I have somewhat inside knowledge and I can tell you that they have multiple teams working on multiple approaches.From SSMB to LPP, they are leaving nothing to chance.

I have been repeatedly pointing out that we don’t know, not claiming that they aren’t making progress. Do you deliberately misread your insider information as well?

>Their process on figuring out DUV tricks doesn’t tell us anything about their progress making that other type of machine.

Yet you have no problem proclaiming it's leading them to a dead end.

It is a dead end path. They probably are exploring multiple paths in parallel. ein0p claimed that their progress down the dead-end path is evidence that they are making good progress down the productive path. It isn’t. That’s all I’m pointing out.

Don’t read more into the post than that. I’m not going to defend an affirmative claim that they aren’t making progress. They have a ton of engineers and are willing to invest in the field, so it is entirely plausible to believe that they’ll catch up.

Also worth pointing out the Overton Window has shifted from "China can't silicon." to "China's doing crappy 7nm." in a span of only a few years.

The copium levels in the atmosphere here are reaching critical levels.

I haven’t seen any “China can’t silicon”. They are catching up sure, and they will eventually do 7nm well, but it seems like instead of praising China for progression, the pro-China people are like “see the west sucks China has 7nm!!!” When the reality is that the 7nm is as good as CPUs 15 years ago. Let’s appreciate that China isn’t siting around doing nothing and improving the competition. But not overhype something.

That is just not true. The Huawei Mate 60 is selling about as much as the iPhone in China atm - it really is a breakthrough product.

That’s simply not true. Release day of iPhone 15 had people queued at the door and sold out online.

Release day of Mate 60 saw Huawei stores empty.

I trust the live videos on the release day providing more evidence of demand that sales numbers which are as manipulated as much as their covid numbers.

They sold 30 mio. according to this:

https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_reaches_30m_sales_of_mate_60...

The 7 nm uses (older) ASLM machines.

“Rhetoric”

There’s no rhetoric. When you phrase things this way it just makes you sound like an anti-USA pro-China troll.

If I was a pro-China troll I’d be supporting these sanctions. Removing the sanctions is the only thing that could strangle their nascent advanced lithography industry in the crib. US government, however, is not smart enough to see it.

That horse left the barn. That's like EU going back to Russian gas, because it's cheaper. Not going to happen.

That's assuming what you say is true (well it's unfalsifiable in foresight) and you are not employing some reverse psychology here. Incidentally I find that pro-China accounts or forums use similar arguments to profusely support removing sanctions.

It’s also quite literally true. There’s a reason there’s only one ASML. That reason is free trade - it makes it untenable to invest hundreds of billions into developing alternatives - you can just buy state of the art instead and move on to higher value things. Now we’ve forced China to (eventually) build “their own ASML”. Which they will eventually succeed at, given the strategic importance of this tech. Oops.

It didn't cost hundreds if billions to build EUV.

> Overall, EUV lithography machines needed more than $6.3B in R&D investments over 17 years to come to market

Japan could do it too (GigaPhoton had viable light source, but no customer).

Even if they were only 10% as efficient in R&D, it's peanuts to Chinese government.

EUV is being talked as some super mega project, but this is basically peanuts. Roughly 80 F-35. Even if rhey are far less efficient i wouldn't count on it for long.

Sure, it's legacy SWE for now, vut even that us better than all countries save 3-4.

Current sanctions are bust, it's time to comtemplate blank ban on chinese made chip.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chip-equipment-ma...

It kind of did though. You’re talking about incremental cost, building on top of what’s already there. And what’s there was already quite formidable

Blanket ban is also not going to work on account of the West only representing 1/8th of the world’s population.

I understand globalization for most run of the mill items but I can’t believe we’ve let the high tech manufacturing go offshore.

Except that Canon released a 5nm node thats market ready about 4 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319

So I'd wager that this investment is to bring technologies such as this up to scale.

This technology is useful for small production volumues only though. It's too slow to produce chips at 5nm at high volumes. If it's also that much cheaper such that you can just throw money at it to produce in parallel, then it may work, but it I haven't seen such comparisons yet.

I don't follow what you are trying to say.

But do-it, do-it-cheap, do-it-at-scale, do-it-right has been the standard playbook out of Asia for 50 years now. I'd suggest that Canon is going down the road of being a player in the 5nm market.

You could summarize it as "Wah Wah, competing technology not as good as trillion dollar R&D from competitor with 20 year market advantage".

Even if it has a lower yield, having a competing technology to EUV is absolutely amazing in several ways.

He is trying to say that until they succesfully move to the "do-it-at-scale, do-it-right" parts, we're at the do-it part atm, and that's no real competition to those doing it at scale and right already.

So the playbook atm is more promise than concrete reality.

Nor is there some law that says "they did it for other technologies, so they'll manage it for this one too" (besides, this is survivorship bias, forgetting about the technologies they didn't manage to do it).

Doesn't cheap comes after scale?

"Wright found that every time total aircraft production doubled, the required labor time for a new aircraft fell by 20%"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

and it's not going super well for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...

I have no problem with that. Look at how cheap photovoltaics became, and how it became win win overall

Sorry but do you have a source for this?

Everything I have read/seen not only points to the Chinese being decades behind but their efforts being black holes of money time and effort that yield NO progress.

Huawei design division was on par with apple. Ymtc was first in the market with 200+ layer NAND.

Their domestic share of semi equipment machines with publuc tenders (=legacy) has gone through the roof and is over 60% (was 10? I think five years ago). These are legacy, so unsanctioned tools.

There is a lot of waste, but there are results.

> Huawei design division was on par with apple.

https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n...

7nm and 3nm are not even in the same ballpark.

And the legacy tech is useful, but this isnt "progress" its production. The distinction is large, production did not sustain declining producers.

Why are the sanctions self-defeating? I don't remember anyone saying China could never do the same thing domestically. They are a powerhouse of industrial espionage after all. Doesn't mean the west has to make it easier for them.

There was a rumour at one point of a 1 T RMB fund for Chinese semiconductors but I don't think that came to be. However it appears that a number of large Chinese firms are getting unlimited state support for research in highend semiconductor production not relying on a US controlled supply chain.

I recommend this piece for anyone who is interested in the current state of the Chinese semi industry:

New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls by Paul Triolo

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the...