How China Built Its 'Manhattan Project' To Rival the West in AI Chips (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0180416371
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/18/140239/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-to-rival-the-west-in-ai-chips
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/
The prototype, completed in early 2025 by former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered the Dutch company's machines, is operational and generating EUV light, though it has not yet produced working chips. The effort is part of a six-year secret government initiative that sources described to Reuters as China's version of the Manhattan Project.
Huawei is coordinating thousands of engineers across companies and state research institutes, and recruits are working under false identities inside secure facilities. The Chinese government is targeting 2028 for producing working chips, though sources say 2030 is more realistic -- still years earlier than the decade analysts had predicted it would take China to match the West.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/
That was fast (Score:5, Informative)
Last year I was predicting 5-10 years until China could make chips. It took them 1. The USA is fucked, especially with that racist, demented asshole in charge.
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>> Last year I was predicting 5-10 years until China could make chips. It took them 1. ...
They're not making chips. The article says "2030 is realistic."
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So let me get this straight. You listened to propaganda that led you to believe "sleepy Joe" would star a shooting war with China?
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Yes, impressively fast, but they have yet to produce any chips, let alone do it at any sort of significant scale. Semicon manufacturing at this level is really hard. China should not be underestimated, but even before when China had access to western machines, they still weren't successful in producing state of the art chips. The machines are of course a key part, but it can still fail on processes and people
Re:Root Cause. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Deluded liberal feminist arrogance seething with zero accountability manifesting into THE most incompetent Didn't Earn It administration in the entire history of America, ultimately created President Trump. Again. After those infected with long-TDS didn't learn their lesson the first time.
> But tell me again how the last four years of American culture being forced to debate keeping parents rights intact with regards to their children being groomed by the rainbow coalition of sex terrorists running classrooms, was SUCH a fantastical worthwhile effort. Along with having to debate whether or not biological men should be able to steal wins, medals, and opportunities from women in "fair" competition. We've known for thousands of years, but let's also debate what a "woman" is too while libtards attack anyone questioning a President suffering from dementia and a VP open border czar addicted to tossing word salads.
> China can make Starships too. Any minute now you'll see those chopsticks catch three at a time. Just don't ask for witnesses. There's only like six spots in the AI-magination parking lot.
Again, another day where trans people didn't entertain my thoughts until a republican brought it up.
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China has been making chips for ages. This is about making AI chips that are comparable with Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon etc using modern fabs (TSMC primarily, also Intel, Samsung, Micron etc that mostly use ASML machines).
The article suggests they're likely > 5 years behind, and that probably isn't to scale production. Also consider EUV was first used in 2018 commercially, 2019 at scale. So maybe early Chinese EUV will be a decade behind when it launches.
Lots of the supporting ecosystem to develop to
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The issue is you have taken China's word they have actually accomplished what they said they did. Personally, I don't believe them until I have seen it. For example, China proclaimed a breakthrough when SMIC made the Kirin 9000 processor for the Huawei Mate 60 Pro in 2023. The chip was a 7nm chip which all the "naysayers" said China could never manufacture. Except it was made using DUV not EUV. No one ever said 7nm was not possible using DUV. The main reason EUV was used was the smaller size meant low yield
Re:..former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered. (Score:4, Interesting)
And USA companies outsourcing to China (CCP) have been funding this project. I'm looking at you APPLE etc. Reminds me of 13-th Century Genoa funding the Mongol invasion of Europe ... for trade concessions. Does the smell of traitorous self-aggrandizement get any stronger ?
Re: ..former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered (Score:1)
global trade is normal, quit whining about the inevitable. China then India will pass up the USA which is in decline.
Re: ..former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered (Score:1)
so funny, Western civilization uses many things....stolen?...from Chinese civilization. Information wants to be free and run around the world.
So 5 years from now, they'll be 5 years behind? (Score:2)
So 5 years from now, they'll still be 5 years behind?
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China is at least 10 years ahead of the US now in most technologies. Flame away but it's true.
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Not in aerospace and not in chips. The two areas that matter the most for the future.
In aerospace, they won't have anything to match Falson 9 until next year or 2027 until they can match the launch cadence. But by then the US will have Starship. It will take the Chinese at least 5 years to catch up to Starship. By which time we'll have something else.
In chips they will always be 5 years behind. By the time they can make FinFET at 2nm, the US will be making CFET transistors in sub nanometer.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes.
Depressingly inevitable (Score:2)
The idea that one country can develop a technology that no other can, is as flawed as it is arrogant. And by refusing to sell advanced technology, the reasons to produce domestic alternatives get stepped up a gear - or several.
Once you accept that a competitor or adversary has both the ability and the will to create technologies domestically, that they would be prohibited from purchasing, you have to accept that the originator has lost control. What is worse is the possibility that they might just make a b
insert idiom here.... (Score:4, Insightful)
At this point: Missed the boat, A day late and a dollar short,That ship has sailed... All of the Trump Tariffs are self serving and he's proven he will T.A.C.O whenever pressure is high enough or if he can self profit...
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Just their luck the AI bubble pops as they finish, and there's a glut on chips on the market.
If yopu need a ... (Score:2)
... massive industrial spy op to get on par, you actually prove your gross incompetence.
Why is China the enemy (Score:1)
Could someone explain why China is the enemy and its progress must be curtailed. Why is everything about competition? What has China done to the west to make them the enemy?
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Here's a quote from the article on how China was able to make their own replica of the ASML machine:
"The ASML veterans made the breakthrough in Shenzhen possible, the people said. Without their intimate knowledge of the technology, reverse-engineering the machines would have been nearly impossible."
IP theft (Score:2)
"The prototype, completed in early 2025 by former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered the Dutch company's machines, is operational and generating EUV light". "recruits are working under false identities inside secure facilities"
China must be paying them a fortune for this theft, no wonder they want to remain anonymous. The basic technique ASML uses to create the EUV light is public knowledge and ASML even describes it, but the machinery to do it is not.
They shine a powerful industrial CO laser at microsc
As expected (Score:2)
Chinese engineers and scientists are smart
Attempting to prevent China from acquiring tech is futile and counterproductive
Cooperation would be better
I do wonder what's going to happen to Nvidia (Score:2)
If they can't keep up with custom hardware then somebody else is going to build it. What's more because AI is a technology that by design is going to consolidate into a few players who have access to training data (google, Facebook and maybe Apple) you are going to have companies so huge they are just going to want to make their own chips.
You've got these companies that a few changes in who makes the chips could drop their value by hundreds of billions of dollars. And you have investors buying in during
There's more to making chips than EUV (Score:2)
Besides EUV, there's also the question of actually making working silicon that's tested and working. The process is: make the silicon wafer; test the silicon wafer; package the few that pass testing.
TSMC are the masters, inventing small machines and leading the world. Apple are 2nd with a working 3nm wafer fab line. Samsung have a working 7nm line, I heard they were upgrading to 5nm, but I never heard of product coming out, so they seem stuck there. Intel has a 10nm wafer fab line, but Intel can't get it
Is the article inaccurate? (Score:1)
The (linked) article begins with:
"It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML (ASML.AS), opens new tab who reverse-engineered the company's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines or EUVs, according to two people with knowledge of the project."
Then, much later in the long article, it explains:
"ASML won an $845 million judgment in 2019 against a former Chinese engineer accused of stealing trade secrets, but the defendant filed for bankruptcy and continues to operate in Bei
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Never mind. My question is answered later in the article:
"The ASML veterans made the breakthrough in Shenzhen possible, the people said. Without their intimate knowledge of the technology, reverse-engineering the machines would have been nearly impossible."
former ASML engineers? (Score:1)
How the hell did our intell services allow them to get "former ASML engineers"!?! Massive fail. And how do you reverse-engineer something when you don't have one to begin with?
Whelp (Score:2)
Smooth seas make poor sailors. The US is creating some outstanding Chinese sailors.
so dumb (Score:1)
You'd think that the idiots in the "security state" would learn by now that the way you control your enemies is to keep them close. When you cut them off completely they will learn to live without you and then you have no leverage. As if China had a shortage of engineers. Or as if eating stroopwafels made Dutch engineers smarter than Chinese engineers.
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They way you control your enemies is you kneecap them opportunity arises.
China is the proof your argument is bullshit. "Open China' has been the policy for how many decades?
All keeping China close has done is
- Let them industrialize
- Let take massive technological leaps by importing western knowledge
- Let them build up a massive armed force we probably can't counter
- Let them a ton to time develop weapons systems (hyper sonic missiles specifically) that will utterly negate our own usual force projection st
Re: so dumb (Score:1)
Taiwan is doomed, population is crashing and the 24 million now will be 10 million by 2100 with 40% over age 65. The end, mainland China only has to wait.
China will pass up the USA in wealth , tech and power. Nothing can be done about that, USA will fade away.
Re:so dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
"Letting them get near" is not exactly putting it in correct terms. Yes such a talking point was part of the sales pitch, but one should by now know the difference between the words and actions in politics.
Western elites sent all their jobs and factories to China, and the Chinese were smart enough to accept it on the condition of technology transfer.
The West itself taught China everything it knows about manufacturing. Everything was delivered to them on a silver platter. There is no other way to put it but treason on a civilizational scale, but it made some of our elites insanely rich, so they made it happen. The result is we already live in a Chinese world, but it will be years before the dust settles and the West wakes up to look around, and the people at fault will be long dead by then.
Coming back to the OP, yes there still was an actual letting them get near strategy available, even after all the outsourcing had happened. The West still had tech lead in three key areas - semiconductors, aerospace, and biotech. All the West had to do was to keep the lead and not fuck it up. The Chinese were happy to buy this stuff from us. Because in the end, they also want to sell to us, and trade needs to be mostly balanced out, otherwise someone is giving away their stuff for free. Money you earn but never spend is not worth the paper it's printed on.
But then the West went and fucked it up. The US, having designated China their enemy number one, and starting all sorts of trade wars, proved to them beyond any doubt, already by Trump's last term, that they would have to be self-sufficient in everything. Now Trump is flailing around like a windmill, but the Chinese are prepared, and Trump has no leverage anymore. China is about to close the gap.
But once the gap has closed - what will the West have left to sell to China? To anyone? Because anything the West can make, the Chinese are about to make better and cheaper. But if you have nothing to sell, you have no money to buy anything, either. The West will end up poor, backwards, and isolated. Like it used to be.
okay (Score:1)
Hear me out - there is a middle ground between "give all your technology to China, hollow out your industrial base and give them Most Favored Nation trading status" and "attempt to completely choke out their economy to the point where they erect entirely separate supply chains and you have no leverage over them."
When someone needs you, you have leverage over them. This is such a basic fact that if you don't understand what I'm saying, you should probably look in a dictionary.
The real problem for the US now
Re: so dumb (Score:3)
Given Hitler's expulsion of the Jews who built the atom bomb, is it inconceivable that liberal democracies are inherently more innovative?
Re: so dumb (Score:1)
no; they become lazy and lose interest in even reproducing. They get enamored with absurd self-destructive notions and glorify ignorance and hedonism.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
> Given Hitler's expulsion of the Jews who built the atom bomb, is it inconceivable that liberal democracies are inherently more innovative?
Perhaps. Before DEI started to prioritize everything but actual competency in hiring.
Oh, one could say it was an "innovative" move alright..
Re: so dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Motherfucker please, there isn't a single person in this administration who isn't a "DEI" hire. None are merit based.
Re: so dumb (Score:2)
Did Reagan use financial innovation to bankrupt the USSR while the US is still fine with 500% more debt today than in his day?
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> is it inconceivable that liberal democracies are inherently more innovative?
It's not inconceivable it's a fact. What so many argue about is why it's a fact and that leads some to think it isn't true.
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For 70 years? Yes. Next time say 20 years and you're closer to an argument but I can assure you just based on what's baked into your 9 words whatever your explanations and prescriptions are not going to work.
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I need a refresher on why China is my enemy.
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exactly... but now that we are fully into 'war' narrative, all the spin doctors are creating deadly enemies out of thin air... it's absolutely excellent that many countries can develop advanced tech, even if a natural disaster strikes or anything like that ,we need backup, as human race, you know. The whole idea of nations is so outdated and just create conflict for nothing...we are the same species ffs.
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That is the problem Archie, you don't need a refreshed you know exactly why but you stubbornly refuse to accept it.
China has a value system completely antithetical to yours. China very much wants Chinese hegemony, in the way the 20th century was the America century.
if you actually give a ***** about anything the things you claim to care about, you should be hellbent on ensuring that does not happen. We all know what you will do though, you'll pretend to care about freedom, democracy, equality etc, while you
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Ok so constructing a few chip faps and dev labs is the same as developing a WMD during wartime, got it.