Thread by @wmhuo168

ASML’s $130 Billion Collapse is a Parable of Western Arrogance

China no longer needs ASML. Not the DUV, not the EUV, and certainly not the overinflated European pricing model that turned basic industrial tools into geopolitical ransom notes.

(1/11)

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tec…

Let’s be clear: China didn’t just survive the export bans. It turned them into fertilizer. The result? An indigenous semiconductor ecosystem that spans etching, deposition, lithography, packaging, and design, all marching under Made-in-China banners.

(2/11)

While the West was fantasizing about "decoupling China" with the Chip and Science Act, China was de-Americanizing its entire semiconductor stack. ASML was just collateral damage, the first, but not the last, sacrificial lamb on the altar of strategic overreach.

(3/11)

ASML should take bitter solace in the fact that it’s not alone. China has effectively sidestepped Lam Research, KLA, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, Canon, and Nikon. All of them are being phased out by a parallel, increasingly superior Chinese toolchain.

(4/11)

And let’s kill the EUV myth while we’re at it. SMIC has already taped out 5nm-class chips without EUV using DUV-based SAQP. Huawei's Kirin 9006C and 9010 are proof. The gatekeepers no longer have keys. The wall has been climbed.

(5/11)

The “value” that ASML lost is actually a mirage of future imperial rents, the assumption that China would stay dependent forever, that it would pay Western prices for Western tools, and that sanctions would freeze tech progress.

(6/11)

Instead, China built the tools, built the fabs, and soon will flood the world with affordable IC chips, not just for AI or smartphones, but for automotives, medical devices, defense, and edge computing.

The future is not in Eindhoven. It’s in Wuxi, Shanghai, and Wuhan.

(7/11)

This is China’s real coup de grâce: not just endurance, but ascendance. It didn’t just walk away from the table. It flipped the table, built its own, and now sets the price of admission for the rest of the world.

(8/11)

India, instead of watching and learning, remains a loyal interpreter of Western decline. The Brahmin Times of India will print 800 words on ASML’s stock dip but never whisper a word about China’s rise from buyer to builder, from assembler to architect.

(9/11)

This is the future the West is unprepared for: where China makes the majority of the world’s chips, not as an OEM, but as the IP owner, the toolmaker, the fab runner, and the platform builder.

Not Taiwan. Not Korea. Not Japan. Not the EU. Just China.

(10/11)

The great decoupling was supposed to be a siege. Instead, it’s a mirror, and in it, the West sees the image of its own irrelevance.

That’s the part no one in Brussels, Washington, or Delhi wants to admit.

(11/11)