For the past 20 years, advanced semiconductor manufacturing has been dominated by a small set of companies in the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States, largely due to the proprietary technology involved in producing such chips. China, however, has been trying to drain that moat. When Reuters reported in December 2025 that researchers in Shenzhen had secretly built a prototype for an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, an indispensable piece of equipment for producing the most advanced chips, commentators debated when China will be able to overcome one of the last remaining obstacles to manufacturing its own advanced semiconductors.
Whether this prototype is a near-term inflection point or a mere steppingstone on a long journey remains difficult to predict. Chinese insiders claim that 2030 is a “realistic target” for making working chips from its prototype, while skeptics posit that it will take decades to reach commercial viability.
There is a way to cut through the noise. Building an EUV machine depends on specific technical chokepoints that can be identified and monitored. Three of the most important are developing high-power, ultra-low-wavelength light sources that print the circuit patterns; creating incredibly smooth mirrors that reflect EUV light onto silicon wafers with atomic-scale precision; and producing the ultra-pure, light-sensitive photoresist chemicals which convert the light blueprint into a physical stencil for the chip’s microscopic wires.
China’s timeline toward an EUV machine is uncertain, but tracking these specific areas can help analysts and policymakers gauge how close Beijing is to semiconductor self-reliance.
Table 1. Where China Is vs. Industry Standard for EUV Lithography
The Question of When
Policymakers, scholars, and industry analysts have not reached a consensus on China’s timeline toward a domestic EUV machine. Estimates range from a few years to several decades.
China’s use of talent poaching and smuggling for overcoming the EUV lithography moat has achieved some results. For instance, China’s breakthrough in laser-produced plasma in March 2025 came from a team at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics led by Lin Nan, who previously led light source technology at Dutch EUV manufacturing company ASML. China’s advancements in precision optics have likewise relied on talent poaching, as exhibited by Huawei’s repeated attempts to lure precision optics engineers from Zeiss with attractive salaries. China has also made significant progress through so-called hybrid engineering, which combines reverse engineering of existing Western EUV technology with domestic innovations.
Some commentators, such as Albright Stonebridge Group technology policy lead Paul Triolo, have drawn on these signs to take a generally less skeptical view of China’s EUV progress than other analysts. According to Triolo, industry observers believe that an “EUV prototype has been ‘complete’ for almost two years.” Triolo suggested that in a bullish scenario, Chinese companies could develop EUV capabilities in pilot lines around 2030.
Other believe this view overstates China’s capabilities. Analyst Greg Allen has argued China’s ability to produce an EUV machine prototype was more likely the result of evading export controls than it was a genuine domestic innovation. China’s challenge, therefore, could be understood as catching up not just to where ASML was, but to where ASML is going. As TechInsights vice chair and semiconductor analyst Dan Hutcheson noted, “The harder they [China] run, they just stay in place.”
It’s no wonder developing an EUV alternative is difficult. EUV machines are some of the most complex machines humans have ever made. An ASML scanner consists of a network of well over 100,000 components. Chris Miller, author of “Chip War,” argued that the roughly three decades of global research required to develop the first commercial EUV system suggests that China’s own timeline will be a long one. This skepticism is reinforced by China’s current reliance on older, foreign-made deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines despite purported EUV breakthroughs. While SMIC has successfully produced advanced chips using this older technology, its yield rates remain a fraction of those TSMC achieves with EUV lithography, casting doubt on the scalability of its domestic manufacturing.
The Light Source
Rather than attempt to resolve the debate between the optimists and the pessimists, it may be more useful to identify the technical moats that will help distinguish between the two worlds in the future. Discussions about when China will overcome the EUV lithography moat revolve around three non-exhaustive but important components, which have been tightly regulated by Western export restrictions.
The first is the light source. China is making progress on creating the EUV light itself but must still make headway on producing it at a high enough power output to manufacture chips at a commercially viable scale. EUV light has a wavelength short enough to allow for incredibly tight patterns to be etched onto silicon wafers. Miller noted that the lasers in ASML’s most advanced machines require 457,329 parts on their own – a figure for the laser subsystem alone, not the full scanner. The high-power CO2 drive laser is built by Germany’s Trumpf, while the surrounding light-source module is supplied by Cymer, a San Diego firm ASML acquired in 2013. ASML integrates these into the complete machine, which has been barred from China since 2019.
Chinese labs have embarked on a parallel effort to both reverse engineer the lasering process that ASML uses, as well as pioneer their own solutions. Facilities at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Harbin Institute of Technology respectively have made substantial progress in the R&D and prototyping of the EUV light source. Yet there are still obstacles that hinder commercial manufacturing.
The EUV light from both methods currently has a power output of 100-150 watts – not as powerful as the 250 watts of output that ASML’s light source achieved in 2017 to produce 125 wafers per hour, nor its current benchmark of 600 watts, and nowhere near the 1000-watt system the company announced in early 2026 research. And compared to ASML, China’s lasers lose too much energy to heat and non-EUV wavelengths instead of producing enough usable 13.5-nm light. The system must thus expose wafers for a longer period, which etches the patterns too slowly to be economically competitive.
As a result, indications that China is making progress toward reaching the initial 250-watt power benchmark without losing too much energy to heat and other wavelengths might serve as a signpost that the domestic program is finally transitioning from a laboratory proof-of-concept to a commercially viable manufacturing reality.
Precision Optics
Once EUV light is created, it needs to be collected, shaped, and directed by a series of ultra-flat mirrors – the most advanced are designed by German company Zeiss – before it can etch microscopic transistor patterns onto a wafer. This is where China’s EUV prototype faces its second major moat.
Peter Kürz, a spokesperson for the Zeiss EUV team, has compared this achievement to creating a mirror so precise that “you could redirect a laser beam to hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon.” Zeiss achieved this feat by polishing the surface to subatomic flatness. The result is a mirror so smooth that if it were the size of Germany, the tallest peak would be less than 1 mm. And even with all that precision, each mirror can still reflect a theoretical maximum of only 70 percent of the EUV light that hits it.
China has achieved limited success in these optical technologies thanks to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as components from Japanese companies Nikon and Canon. Researchers at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics designed an optical system with similar mirrors layered with molybdenum and silicon, which were each reportedly able to reflect about 65 percent of the EUV light. While this 5 percentage point difference may sound small, a typical EUV machine uses ten to 12 mirrors to reflect and focus the EUV light onto the wafer, compounding the effects. The result is that China’s best mirrors require significantly more power output or exposure time from the light source to get the same throughput of usable wafers that ASML does with its smoother mirrors.
Several breakthroughs could signal that China is gaining ground in this area. For instance, Chinese optical research labs could produce prototypes or spin-offs of the ion beam figuring technology that enables sub-nanometer polishing of their mirrors. Or they could make breakthroughs in domestic metrology tools, which allow Zeiss to measure and verify surface irregularities at the picometer scale. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is currently developing its own EUV microscopy techniques to identify chip defects, representing an emerging domestic metrology effort in China.
Photoresists
Once the EUV light etches its pattern, a light-sensitive chemical coating called photoresist determines which parts of the wafer are protected and which are etched away. These chemical coatings act as photographic film for microchips. China can produce them, but not yet at the purity levels required for EUV lithography.
Chipmakers such as TSMC source 95 percent of their EUV photoresists from Japan due to its unique ability to produce ultra-pure chemicals required for advanced chips. China, too, buys some 90 percent of its high-end photoresist supply from Japan despite an aggressive push to develop domestic production. Compared to other components of EUV lithography, China has found it more difficult to poach the few top personnel who know the complete formula for these ultra-pure chemicals, and the six-month shelf lives of finished batches make stockpiling difficult.
China has been making progress, however. Companies like Xuzhou B&C Chemical, Shanghai Sinyang, Red Avenue, and Jingrui are all racing toward self-reliance on the argon-fluoride (ArF) photoresists used to manufacture advanced nodes, although less than 1 percent of the chemical is currently sourced domestically. For its part, Xuzhou B&C claims it will mass-produce several core photoresist materials for advanced nodes within five years.
For EUV lithography, a telltale barrier of Chinese progress remains the purity of its photoresist. The impurity threshold for EUV photoresists is in the sub-parts-per-billion to parts-per-trillion, for which China is only in the nascent stages of R&D. In July 2025, however, a team at Tsinghua University announced a breakthrough in the development of EUV photoresists using a formulation different from that used by Japanese companies. It is a promising lab result, but it still has a long way to go before it could be used in an actual factory. If these new photoresist efforts become practical for high volume manufacturing, it may signal that China is making strides towards this purity goal.
There are many predictions for when China will produce a commercially viable EUV lithography machine, but none can be verified in advance. A more productive framing is narrower: where is China falling short, and what would progress look like? There should be systematic surveillance of the three aspects examined here – light source power, mirror smoothness, and photoresist purity – to track where China is gaining ground. While tracking these moats may not definitively resolve the larger “when” question, they can give observers clues as the moment approaches.