Thread by @wmhuo168

On July 19, 2025, China killed the silicon wafer. And with it, ASML’s monopoly, TSMC’s moat, and every American chip sanction. You just didn’t hear the explosion. Time to break it down. (1/21)

nature.com/articles/s4169…

Part I: The Atomic Truth

Most people think the chip war is about geopolitics. It’s not. It’s about atomic ratios. And China just mastered a law of nature the West still struggles to pronounce: stoichiometry. (2/21)

Stoichiometry is the a priori rulebook for matter. Not a lab trick. Not engineering. It’s the logic atoms obey when forming compounds. You get the ratios right or the structure collapses. Period. (3/21)

Silicon is forgiving. You can tweak and etch and polish. Add more doping. Fix things post-growth. That’s why the entire Western chip industry is addicted to photolithography and brute-force scaling. (4/21)

Indium selenide (InSe) is not forgiving. It’s a 2D compound. One atom thick. One indium per selenium. Anything less than perfect stoichiometry? You get garbage. Defects. No chip. No circuit. (5/21)

That’s what makes China’s breakthrough historic. Their scientists didn’t invent InSe. They cracked how to grow it perfectly. At scale. With atomic self-correction. No ASML needed. No permission slip. (6/21)

Their method vaporizes indium, condenses it into a liquid layer, and grows InSe by balancing the atomic ratio in real time. The process self-regulates the stoichiometry. That’s the key. (7/21)

They didn’t stop at flakes. They built 5 cm wafers. They etched transistor arrays. They proved it works on a chip, not just under an electron microscope. It’s fabrication-grade. (8/21)

This isn’t a lab paper. It’s the exit wound from the silicon era. The stoichiometric bottleneck is gone. The rest is just assembly. (9/21)

Part II: After Silicon

InSe outperforms silicon in every category that matters:
• 5–10x higher electron mobility
• Atomic thickness
• Tunable bandgap
• Lower power leakage
• Faster switching (10/21)

And unlike graphene, InSe has a real bandgap. It can switch on and off. That makes it a true semiconductor, not a science fair. (11/21)

With China’s new method, this material is now scalable. Which means the entire Western chip industry—built on legacy silicon and ASML tooling—just got outflanked at the atomic level. (12/21)

This wasn’t a node race. It was a material regime shift. While the West focused on 3nm vs 2nm, China rewrote the substrate itself. No EUV. No supply chain fragility. No fab dependency. (13/21)

They don’t need ASML. They don’t need TSMC. They don’t need CUDA. They don’t need Synopsys. The entire ecosystem was decoupled upstream—where the periodic table lives. (14/21)

Western press won’t touch this. There’s no stock ticker. No IPO angle. No Nvidia soundbite. Just a quiet atomic realignment happening under their feet. (15/21)

What comes next is deterministic:
• InSe-native AI accelerators
• Next-gen telecom chips
• Neuromorphic cores
• Fully domestic 2D logic stacks
• Military-grade compute, off-limits to sanctions (16/21)

China didn’t just win the chip war. It exited the battlefield. It no longer competes in silicon. It forges new material futures, governed by first principles, not supply chains. (17/21)

Every restriction the U.S. imposes from here out will be too late. You can’t sanction a law of nature. You can’t embargo a material you no longer understand. (18/21)

The future won’t be built on 2nm silicon. It’ll be built on atomically perfect InSe, grown in a Beijing lab, untouched by ASML, unseen by the West, and unshackled from the past. (19/21)