Crazy that the US had to block ASML selling to China. I would have thought they'd do that themselves to reduce the risk of reverse engineering.

Trying to prevent someone from having something they want is the best way to make them work twice harder to get it.

I think what is crazy here is that the USA can block a Dutch company from selling their products. Don't get me wrong, this would have made sense in the world 15 years ago, but today? We all know that China plays dirty, but all those US made LLM's sure seem to know an awful lot about things in IP protected content.

Though to be fair, I think everyone knew that China was always going to have their 100% domestic chip manufacturing supply chain. I'd argue that the blocks were mainly a delaying tactic by the USA oligarchy. Simply blocking ASML from doing business with China would in itself motivate China to move faster, but I guess the decision makers and their advisors calculated that it would be slower than letting China buy the machinery and reverse engineer it.

Of course that didn't really work out. The only reason the media is picking up on these stories is that China, did, get their hands on the machinery, but then... of course they did.

asml will be profitable even after china catches up with their current tech. its not a silicon valley type company that wants a monopoly. if anything most of their engineers secretly want china to compete so they can push each other to do more advanced research.