Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Perhaps in a decade China can succeed in building its own EUV scanner. If so, the program will cost tens of billions of dollars, but—in a revelation that is bound to be discouraging—when it’s ready it will no longer be cutting edge. By that time, ASML will have introduced a new generation tool, called high-aperture EUV, which is scheduled to be ready in the mid-2020s and cost $300 million per machine, twice the cost of the first generation EUV machine. Even if a future Chinese EUV scanner works just as well as ASML’s current equipment—hard to imagine, given that the U.S. will try to restrict its ability to access components from other countries—Chinese chipmakers using this hypothetical alternative EUV machine will struggle to produce profitably with it, because by 2030, TSMC, Samsung, and Intel will have already used their own EUV scanners for a decade, during which time, they’ll have perfected their use and paid down the cost of these tools. They’ll be able to sell chips produced with EUV for far cheaper than a Chinese company using a hypothetical Chinese-built EUV tool.

Establishing a cutting-edge, all-domestic supply chain would take over a decade and cost well over a trillion dollars in that period. This is why, despite the rhetoric, China’s not actually pursuing an all-domestic supply chain. Beijing recognizes this is simply impossible. China would like a non-U.S. supply chain, but because of America’s heft in the chip industry and the extraterritorial power of its export regulations, a non-American supply chain is also unrealistic, except perhaps in the distant future. What is plausible is for China to reduce its reliance on the United States in certain spheres and to increase its overall weight in the chip industry, weaning itself off as many choke-point technologies as possible.