The interesting part here isn’t “can China copy ASML’s machines,” it’s whether they can copy ASML’s ecosystem. EUV is a stack of insanely tight supplier relationships, Zeiss optics, service networks, and years of painful yield tuning, not just a light source in a lab. China can absolutely brute force its way to “good enough” over time, but what still holds them back is everything you can’t buy on the secondary market: trusted optics at scale, field-proven reliability, and the boring industrial plumbing that lets a tool run 24/7 in a fab without drama

Most of that entire network is easy to replicate, as in it's not technically hard, the hard part is validation, no one in PRC wants to use unproven PRC inputs if risk is 100m wafer run goes to trash. Hence PRC now basically insuring domestic fabs on risk runs using domestic inputs, which are being validated on full scale production, instead of taking 5 years to verify, it'll take 2. Export controls help this, i.e. domestic resist basically required now after JP export controls.

The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.

China seems to be doing well on supply chain integration (with the exception of the trust part).

Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.