China appears closer to EUV capability without having obtained ASML's production-ready machine.

The US allegation that an ASML EUV machine reached China remains unverified, and ASML says Washington has provided it no supporting evidence.

China has, however, reached a different milestone by building its own crude EUV prototype in Shenzhen, reportedly with former ASML engineers and parts sourced from older equipment.

That prototype can generate the required EUV light, but it has not produced working chips, with precision optics still among the hardest unresolved problems.

ASML says it can locate all 340 EUV machines it ever produced, 26 of them decommissioned, since its engineers alone move and service them. Yet components and subsystems travel through a long tail of specialist vendors with no comparable tracking.

Washington may be aiming at the wrong unit of control. China does not need an ASML-class EUV scanner to weaken the lithography chokepoint.

Its prototype already generates EUV light but cannot make working chips, with precision optics among the hardest gaps. Progress can therefore arrive subsystem by subsystem rather than as one finished machine.

China's installed DUV fleet already matters because SMIC and Huawei can use multi-patterning to make advanced logic without EUV.

So DUV multi-patterning changes what "too expensive" means in a strategic technology contest. The process requires extra manufacturing steps and produces more defects than EUV, so commercial economics worsen. But when the alternative is no domestic advanced chip, a state-backed program can tolerate costs a merchant foundry would reject.