The questions are whether China possesses or will soon possess super-sophisticated chip-making technology, as claimed by a couple of informants at a Shenzhen factory; whether the Chinese Communist Party deliberately leaked information, some true, some false, about the Shenzhen work to Reuters; if the Reuters story is indeed a CCP production, what the Party hopes to gain by it.
In an earlier post, I might have been more skeptical about a Reuters report on Shenzhen’s in-progress EUV machine, technology that so far only the Dutch firm ASML knows how to make, if I’d kept in mind James Roth’s discussion of disinformation in these pages (“Chinese Wonder Weapons That May Kill Us All or Not”). The EUV machine in Shenzhen is a wonder weapon. If it could work and be finalized and replicable by 2028 or 2030, it would enable all sorts of wondrous things in military and other tech for which China must currently rely on lax and gullible enemy countries.
I certainly would have been more skeptical if I had been acquainted with Lei’s discussion of the Shenzhen machine on Lei’s Real Talk (December 23, 2025). She thinks it’s open-and-shut that the Reuters story amounts to a CCP press release.
“I don’t believe Reuters can independently obtain information at this level of classification,” she says. “So it’s very obvious that the information is intentionally leaked from Beijing. Because it would be perceived as more credible than Beijing’s own formal announcement. In other words, the CCP deliberately gave Reuters this exclusive story.”
A crude workaround
Regarding the supposed near-viability of the EUV machine in Shenzhen, one red flag is its reported size. “It occupies nearly an entire floor of a factory. It’s far larger than the EUV machines made by ASML, [which are] roughly the size of a school bus.” The Shenzhen machine is so very large because efforts to more precisely copy ASML’s EUV machines failed. “So engineers adopted a workaround. The result is a crude, oversized machine.”
After discussing why the Chinese totalitarian system is lousy at independent thinking and innovation but great at stealing patents and reverse engineering, Lei concludes that the Shenzhen operation is probably still falling way short of what it needs to do to make what ASML makes.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography is “not just a machine, it’s an entire ecosystem…. Even if China has managed through theft and brute force to barely assemble an EUV prototype, and even if that machine gradually improves over time, building a completely stable and sustainable EUV supply chain would still require overcoming hundreds of choke points.”
On LinkedIn, ASML engineer Naman Sachdeva says that its EUV machines “are not just about creating EUV but how many technologies, from EUV and optics to mechatronics, work together in tandem to mass-produce high yield wafers. Years of perfecting not only the design but also the process of making all these different technologies working together has made ASML what it is today, as explained in depth in Chip War by Chris Miller and Focus by Marc Hijink.”
What the CCP hopes to gain by fooling us about its half-baked EUV machine is readier access right now to Western chip tech. Lei: “Beijing wants to say…if you can’t stop me, then you should stop blocking me…. By releasing the story to Reuters, Beijing wants to create doubts and even panic in the West.”
