How China built its “Manhattan Project” to compete with the West in AI chips

SINGAPORE –

At a high-security lab in Shenzhen, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has been trying to prevent for years: a prototype machine capable of producing cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to the West’s military dominance.

The prototype, which was completed at the beginning of 2025 and is currently being tested, fills almost an entire factory hall. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUVs), according to two people with knowledge of the project.

EUV machines are at the center of a technological cold war. They use beams of extreme ultraviolet light to etch circuits thousands of times thinner than a human hair onto silicon wafers, a skill currently monopolized by the West. The smaller the circuits, the more powerful…