At a time when competition for semiconductor technologies is intensifying between major powers, China is increasing its efforts to reduce its dependence on foreign equipment, and in particular lithography machines – these “engraving machines” essential to the manufacture of computer chips. After years of limitations imposed by the United States and its allies, China suffered a certain technological delay in the production of the most efficient chips, particularly in the technique of nanometric etching of transistors using extreme ultraviolet EUV methods. A technology that is only mastered by the Dutch company ASML. However, recent information that has leaked from the Chinese giant Huawei, under Western sanction but which is now a world leader in electronics, particularly in the field of networks and telecommunications, shows that China is currently breaking the technological threshold and catching up with Europe, after having made notable progress in this strategic area.
Read: Technology assessment 2025: China establishes itself as the world leader, demonstrating the effectiveness of socialism
A functional EUV prototype, but still embryonic in record times: the demonstration of the strength of socialist planning
According to a Reuters investigation taken up by the specialized media The DigitalsChinese engineers have successfully developed a working prototype of an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine in a highly secure laboratory in Shenzhen. This technology, essential for etching the circuits of the most advanced chips – notably those used in artificial intelligence or high-end smartphones – was until now the almost absolute monopoly of the Dutch group ASML. Of course the machine must still be optimized, because certain technological aspects, in optics in particular, must still progress: modern EUV photolithography developed by ASML integrates extremely fine optical systems, produced in particular by the German company Zeiss, to which the Chinese still do not have independent access. Let us remember that the Zeiss company, with a few others, embodied the industrial and technological know-how of the GDR, then one of the most imposing.
At the same time, China is mastering the massive production of less fine engraving chips. Local manufacturers like Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE) and other players like SiCarrier are developing DUV tools and aiming for more advanced capabilities, but their systems are aimed at etch nodes mature or intermediate (like 28 nm and above), and struggle to compete in reliability and precision with ASML machines or their Japanese equivalents.
If the CEO of ASML, Christophe Fouquet, still believed last April that it would be necessary “many, many years” to China to achieve this, reality seems to have caught up with forecasts more quickly than expected. Because the Chinese prototype EUV machine was completed as early as October 2025. And it was produced by circumventing US sanctions established in 2018. Recent versions of ASML machines, such as High-NA EUV systems capable of producing nodes below 5nm or beyond, have never been delivered to China.
Chinese socialist engineering and industry have thus succeeded in a few years, by focusing their resources so as to plan and resolve the most important technical difficulties. Industrial production of EUV chips is now planned for 2028. In fact, patents have been filed, testifying to the mastery of structuring parts of fine engraving processes up to 3nm.
This is new, very concrete proof that, contrary to what is propagated by anti-communist brainwashing in France, communism works.
JBC for www.initiative-communiste.fr
