> You need to see it from their perspective. "huge step behind" is better than "we have nothing, let's just die".

Yes but that doesn't answer the question of how they got so close to nvidia.

> It could also happen that all their DUV investment allows them to discover a valuable DUV-derived tech tree branch that the west hasn't discovered yet.

But why wouldn't the west discover that same branch but now for EUV?

> Results are at least good enough that Huawei can produce 7nm-5nm-ish phones and sell them at profit.

Sidenote, I'd love to see some photos and an analysis of the quality of their process.

> Yes but that doesn't answer the question of how they got so close to nvidia.

Talent pool and market conditions. China was already cultivating a talent pool for decades, with limited success. But it had no market. Nobody, including Chinese, wanted to buy Chinese stuff. Without customers, they lacked practice to further develop their qualities. The sanctions gave them a captive market. That allowed them to get more practice to get better.

> But why wouldn't the west discover that same branch but now for EUV?

DUV and EUV are very different. They will have different branches. The point however is not whether the west can reach valuable branches or not. It's that western commentators have a tendency to paint Chinese efforts as futile, a dead end. For the Chinese, this is about survival. This is why western commentators keep being surprised by Chinese progress: they expected the Chinese to achieve nothing. From the Chinese perspective, any progress is better than none, but no progress is ever enough.

China has been producing ARM chips like the A20, H40 (raspberry pi class competitors, dual and quad core SOC; went in to a lot of low end 720p tablets in the early 2010s) for a while now, their semiconductor industry is not zero. The biden administration turning off the chip supply in 2022 was nearly 3 years ago; three years is not nothing, especially with existing industry, and virtually limitless resources to focus on it. Probably more R&D capacity will be coming online here in the next year or two as the first crop of post-export control grads start entering the workforce in China.