Reuters - Exclusive: How China built its āManhattan Projectā to rival the West in AI chips
$ASML.AS
Reuters has published an article describing how china has managed to build a prototype EUV machine for producing state of the art semiconductor chips. No chips have been produced yet though.
Chinese scientists, backed by a six-year state initiative, have secretly built and begun testing a crude but operational prototype EUV lithography machine in a Shenzhen lab. Apparently they reverseāengineered technology from ASML and parts salvaged from older Western tools. The machine, described as Chinaās āManhattan Projectā for semiconductors, can generate EUV light but has not yet produced working chips. Beijingās goal is chip production by 2028, though people involved see 2030 as more realistic, still years earlier than many analysts expected.
The project relies heavily on Chineseāborn former ASML engineers working under aliases, aggressive global recruitment with large bonuses, and a nationwide network of institutes and companies coordinated by Huawei, whose engineers often live onāsite under strict security.
Chinaās main bottleneck is reproducing ultraāprecise optics like those supplied to ASML by Carl Zeiss, so research institutes such as CIOMP and the Shanghai Institute of Optics are racing to develop domestic alternatives while teams of young engineers painstakingly reverseāengineer EUV and DUV components sourced via secondary markets and intermediaries despite U.S.-led export controls.
I'm not worried yet.
Source (paywall):
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/