Ask two of the industry’s loudest voices when China will catch up in chipmaking tools, and the answers land years apart.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, speaking at the All-In Summit, named 2030. His reasoning had little to do with any machine unveiled so far. What matters, he suggested, is whether China can take a working prototype and scale it into mass production.
Elon Musk was far more bullish. In an interview with China Media Group, the Tesla and SpaceX chief gave the country a handful of years to loosen the bottlenecks holding back its computing buildout.
That spread is not academic. ASML is the lone maker of extreme-ultraviolet lithography, the equipment behind every leading-edge logic chip. Were China to match it, the export curbs meant to deny it those machines would count for far less.
Musk has skin in the question. He is building a Texas fabrication campus, Terafab, to secure supply for his companies, and has repeatedly warned that chips might one day stop flowing out of Taiwan.
Others warn the pressure cuts both ways. ASML’s own chief has said that squeezing China too hard risks manufacturing a rival.
Neither forecast comes with a roadmap, and no Chinese company has demonstrated a working EUV system in public.
