To date, ASML says, no EUV lithography machines have been shipped to China, which means that unless – or until – it invents its own EUV lithography machines, China will be working with technology a few years older, and less powerful, than that of western countries – deep ultraviolet lithography, for example, instead of extreme ultraviolet.
Artificial intelligence, another technology in which the US and China are fiercely competing to advance, relies on among the world’s most complex and powerful semiconductor chips.
A small town in the Netherlands hosts the only factory that produces the only chip-making machines that generate a type of light found nowhere naturally on Earth: extreme ultraviolet, a light emitted by young stars in outer space.
ASML makes the machines that make chips, but it doesn’t make the chips themselves.
Because Taiwan makes and supplies so many of the US’s semiconductor chips, the US has an added interest in protecting Taiwan amid concerns that China will invade.
