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China’s EUV Lithography Progress: Parsing Signal From Noise

China faces three specific barriers as it aims to produce key chipmaking equipment. Monitoring progress in these areas would help Western countries make better chip and AI policy.

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

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. 

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.........

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