alt Hacker NewsHow China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
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With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders.
You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts:
> The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype
Good for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).
Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.
I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.
A better title would be "New EUV light source built in Shenzhen". Light source said to be working, not fabbing chips yet. Few technical details in the Reuters article.
The "Manhattan Project" part is that the research lab was confidential...which doesn't seem that unusual for a high profile research lab, but that aside.
Comparing China's public efforts to build a computer chips industry to the US effort to nuke Japan is kinda wild. Outside of the bait part, the piece coming from Japan Times makes it that much spicier.
Why is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
I'd argue ASML's moat isn't the machine itself but the ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, decades of supplier relationships, institutional knowledge.
This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
This is undoubtedly a good news story, and the most wonderful part is that the article mentions that 14 organizations declined to comment on the matter.
This article is more skeptical:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...
I can't wait for China to put its full heft in manufacturing advanced graphics cards, fast storage and much more. We need competition.
The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.
Hopefully this doesn’t stoke a third and final world war.
It seems extremely dishonest to frame the project of improving computer chip manufacturing to the development of weapons of mass destruction— weapons that went on to be used against civilians. Sensationalist and propagandistic framing for what is otherwise an interesting article.
It's kind of nasty that a fresh society of capable people has the drive to achieve technological excellence and the incumbents do whatever they can to delay this, even though it's inevitable and there's a lot to gain by empowering them. All in the name of "they are not us".
World has gained so much from modern Chinese industrial revolution. Why suddenly everyone got cold feet? Nobody was stopping Germany or Japan on their way up even though they were literal former enemies with history of brutal warfare. China never done anything even comparable to others.
The interesting part here isn’t “can China copy ASML’s machines,” it’s whether they can copy ASML’s ecosystem. EUV is a stack of insanely tight supplier relationships, Zeiss optics, service networks, and years of painful yield tuning, not just a light source in a lab. China can absolutely brute force its way to “good enough” over time, but what still holds them back is everything you can’t buy on the secondary market: trusted optics at scale, field-proven reliability, and the boring industrial plumbing that lets a tool run 24/7 in a fab without drama
Seems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.
Also interesting huge project: China is building a $116 billion dam which, according to Bloomberg, is expected to generate 70 GW, just to compare: UK whole capacity (de-rated) is around 70 GW.
Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
In 1945 as World War 2 wrapped up and the Cold War started, many in the US believed that it would take the Soviet Union 20+ years to build the atomic bomb. It took 4 years. There were several reasons for this. It became a national security interest, there were leaks to the USSR by people who thought the US shouldn't have a monopoly on the bomb and Americans in general viewed the Soviets as backward farmers.
I see the same thing with China. It's not so much espionage now (although there might be that) but China instead will just hire people with the right knowledge, so former employees of ASML, Nvidia, TSMC, etc.
I've been saying for awhile that China won't tolerate the export ban on ASML's best lithography machines and NVidia's best chips. It's a national security issue. And China is the one country on Earth I have faith can dedicate itself to a long term goal.
And yet I got the same reaction. "The Chinese will never catch up", etc. Reports have been comiung out that Huawei has started developing and using their own 7nm chips.
Weirdly, the US created this problem. By restricting exports of chips to China, Chinese manufacturers had no choice but to develop their own chips. Had China been flooded with NVidia chips, there would be far less market opportunity.
The American economy is essentially a bet on an AI future now. Were it not for like 7 tech companies, we'd be in a technical recession. I also believe that bubble is going to burst. But the economy as a whole pretty much now requires US dominance of an AI future and I think a lot of people are in for a rude shock as China completely disrupts that.
China hasn't caught up yet. There are still many steps in the supply chain and chip design as a whole but making their own chips at sub-7nm is a massive step in that direction.
> It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUVs)
This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation?
Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.
> China’s prototype lags behind ASML’s machines largely because researchers have struggled to obtain optical systems such as those from Germany’s Carl Zeiss, one of ASML’s key suppliers, the two people said.
So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need.
They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.
We learn that before 2023 EUV lithography was worthless. "AI" is the only reason why China would want this technology!
EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?
If I were running this show, I would have a second concurrent project as a hedge and as a chance of leapfrogging the West: trying to make free electron laser lithography work.
Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms.
So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c