technology

Yeah. It's actually Russia that is around 10 to 15 years from catching up. I've been following both the Russian and Chinese state firms in charge of developing semiconductor fab tooling. The main Chinese firm is about to make a full two or three generation leap past ASML (the top western firm) in the coming 3 or so years. The Russian state firm in charge of this type of tooling hasn't made anything since shortly before the USSR fell, back when Russia still maintained semiconductor lithography tech parity with the US and only right around the time the Ukraine war kicked off have they started back up their r&d.

The new EUV light source and lithography machines China has going into trial production are more advanced than anything ASML (where TSMC & western fabs get their EUV light source) has in the works. China decided to leapfrog the western firms by skipping the inefficient method of vaporizing tin microspheres with a laser to make pulses of EUV light (extremely inefficient, low quality light) and instead is going with particle accelerators to generate continuous EUV light that is higher quality (greater culmination, narrower frequency range) and higher output (10 to 100 times brighter for given power input) while using less valuable fab infrastructure space. Because a particle accelerator lacks all the moving parts and is mostly solid state, it has many times greater mean time between failure compared to the ASML machines that have duty cycles around only 90% operational uptime and 10% maintenance downtime. Rather than needing to build/buy a dozen or more EUV machines to equip a fab at scale (one ASML light source per lithography station) and have them still be a production bottleneck, you can install a single one of the Chinese particle accelerator light sources to provide EUV light to more than a dozen lithography stations placed around the circumference of its ring.

edit:

another observation. the western lithography tooling firms seem to be at a tech development disadvantage because they make so much of their money from service contracts to maintain the machines they sell. I could never see ASML decide on their own to create the type of hardware Chinese state firms have in the works because the complexity and unreliably of their machines is a major source of revenue after they make the initial sale. Their board of directors and shareholders would never allow it. ASML would also never design a machine that can replace a dozen or more machines of the same cost even if it meant higher quality output for the end user. This is why I can't see them competing in the long run now that China has made development of advanced lithography tooling a national priority with full backing of the state.