Export controls have slowed China’s semiconductor ambitions, but older chipmaking equipment is enabling Beijing to narrow the AI hardware gap.

The United States and its allies have spent the past three years attempting to deny China the machines needed to make advanced computer chips. Since 2019, the Netherlands has restricted the export of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems made by ASML—the $250 million, bus-sized instruments required to print the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Each machine contains more than 100,000 parts and mirrors so smooth that, scaled to the size of Germany, their largest imperfection would stand less than a millimeter tall.

Broadly speaking, the ban has held. Since 2019, not a single EUV machine has been exported to China. And yet Huawei is now on the cusp of producing advanced AI chips by the millions.

China’s Workaround: Older Lithography Machines Keep AI Chip Production Alive 

The key to China’s domestic chipmaking prowess lies in the previous generation of ASML’s product catalog. Chipmaking is largely a printing business. Lithography machines project patterns of light onto silicon wafers—and the finer the light, the smaller the circuits. EUV is the finest-resolution instrument ever built for this purpose. But its predecessor, a class of machine that uses deep ultraviolet immersion (DUVi) lithography, remains legal to sell to most Chinese buyers. These older tools use a coarser beam of light, which should limit them to printing older, larger circuits.

Read more at The National Interest.