Design? No
Fabs? The advantage is insurmountable as long as the US keeps preventing ASML from exporting EUV to China
Making a lithography machine that’s on par with ASML is just an engineering challenge. One that’s been solved once already by ASML, whose to say it can’t be solved again by someone else, especially if they can copy bits of the design.
It took them almost 20 years to make EUV machines that do it at scale. Canon and Nikon gave up on it.
They also have many suppliers like Zeiss that may not be allowed to export to China, but I’m not sure about which ones are and which ones aren’t
Things can be done a lot quickly if you are given an unlimited budget. Consider how quickly NASA got from nothing to landing on the moon, vs how long it is taking now with their much more limited budget.
Yeah fuck that. As a Dutch citizen it should be up to our government to decide whether we let ASML export. But no, it’s got to be the Americans.
The Dutch government is ultimately making the decisions, they could remove all export restrictions if they wanted but that would really sour its relationship with the US gov’t.
That’s easier said than done when you have a proverbial gun pointed at your head https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members’_Protection_Act
