China Woos Western Tech Talent in Race for Chip Supremacy (msn.com) 74
Chinese companies are aggressively recruiting foreign tech talent as a key strategy to gain technological supremacy, prompting national security concerns across Western nations and Asia, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing multiple intelligence officials and corporate sources. The campaign focuses particularly on advanced semiconductor expertise, with companies like Huawei offering triple salaries to employees at critical firms like Zeiss SMT and ASML, which produce essential components for cutting-edge chip manufacturing.
These recruitment efforts intensified after Western export controls restricted China's access to advanced technology. While Taiwan and South Korea have implemented strict countermeasures, including criminal penalties for illegal talent transfers, the U.S. and Europe struggle to balance open labor markets with national security concerns.
Chinese firms often obscure their origins through local ventures and persistent recruitment tactics. The strategy has shown results: Former employees have helped Chinese companies advance their technological capabilities, including SMIC's development of 7nm chips with help from ex-TSMC talent.
These recruitment efforts intensified after Western export controls restricted China's access to advanced technology. While Taiwan and South Korea have implemented strict countermeasures, including criminal penalties for illegal talent transfers, the U.S. and Europe struggle to balance open labor markets with national security concerns.
Chinese firms often obscure their origins through local ventures and persistent recruitment tactics. The strategy has shown results: Former employees have helped Chinese companies advance their technological capabilities, including SMIC's development of 7nm chips with help from ex-TSMC talent.
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TSMC needs ASML equipment for its cutting-edge chip tech, correct.
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That is about 90% correct. The missing 10% is that ASML is a multinational corporation, with offices in sixteen countries, and technical employees living in even more nations than that. The equipment is AFAIK built in the Netherlands, but its design is internationally sourced.
Re:"national security" my arse! (Score:4, Informative)
You can build an ultraviolet lithography machine in your garage (people have). China already has their own home grown "deep" UV technology that uses argon fluoride lasers at 193 nm, reportedly with many of the bells and whistles. That's the same tech that the vast majority of chips (and many of the layers on all the chips) are made with today, Chinese or otherwise.
In the 90s some of the US national labs did research into the possibility of using soft x-rays at around 12 nm for lithography. The results were licensed to interested companies. Canon and Nikon, leaders in lithography at the time, seem to have been excluded because they were strong foreign competitors, or maybe they just thought it was a dumb idea, which left Intel and a couple of nobodies: the Dutch company ASML (originally part of Phillips) and another company that ASML later bought. Note that any patents on the 90s stuff should have expired by now.
So ASML spent 20 years working on it and, along with a bunch of additional European funded research, eventually by ~2018 made a practical-ish machine that managed to be better than the other approaches to beyond-DUV lithography. It's kind of a Rube Goldberg thing. The whole optical path has to be in vacuum, and it produces the x-rays by firing lasers at flying tin droplets to blast them into plasma.
So for the last five years ASML has basically had a monopoly on the lithography machines for making the very smallest feature size chips. Actual fabricators like TSMC buy those machines and a bunch of other stuff and figure out how to run them efficiently to mass produce chips.
There's nothing really stopping China from doing the same development ASML did, except time, although they can probably accelerate that somewhat by throwing money at the problem. Or they could choose one of the several other approaches and ignore EUV entirely.
The whole thing is very much about commercial chips. Military chips don't use tiny process nodes because a) you don't throw away your missiles and airplanes every year and buy new ones like people do phones and b) the bigger feature stuff is more resistant to things like radiation anyway. And if you really, really need to make scratches in silicon that are less than 20-30 nm there are a bunch of less economically viable existing ways to do it. You can even use regular old DUV because of all the tricks people have developed, it's just slower.
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Indeed. I am surprised they are surprised.
Re:"national security" my arse! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"national security" my arse! (Score:5, Informative)
China does not keep foreign citizens as hostages.
Yes, they do.
Detention of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig [wikipedia.org]
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The interesting part of the wiki article that wasn't mentioned much in the news is this part.
"Government settlement and allegations of intelligence sharing
According to a report by The Globe and Mail in November 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement against the federal government for involving him in espionage activities without his knowledge. Spavor alleges that he provided Michael Kovrig with intelligence on North Korea, which Kovrig then secretly gave to the Canadian government and its Five
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Completely different situation. I get that you are not smart enough to see that.
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Note though that it was in retaliation for the US doing it the same thing to their citizens.
Somehow we have gone back to this cold war bullshit.
Re: "national security" my arse! (Score:2)
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People go to Dubai for work, with it's religious laws and zealous enforcement.
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and that is what this is, "national security" is just an obvious pretext
Correct.
Indeed. Protectionism is usually the last stage before the ones doing it lose.
That's just flatly incorrect, historically speaking.
That said, unless the West wants to lose all moral superiority
Agreed.
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"unless the West wants to lose all moral superiority"
over CHINA??
Western nations may be very far from angelic but that's setting the bar in the basement
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These days I'm struggling to find areas where we are clearly morally superior. We have been complicit in genocide, LGBTQ rights are under attack, not nearly enough is being done about climate change.
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Yep, same here.
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These days I'm struggling to find areas where we are clearly morally superior. We have been complicit in genocide
China is doing actual genocide.
LGBTQ rights are under attack
And how are LGBTQ rights in China, by comparison?
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On the LGBTQ rights in China, at least it's not illegal over there. Gender affirming care is available to those who need it, which currently puts them ahead of the UK and US in some respects. Certainly well ahead of places like Dubai, where many Westerners seem happy to go and work.
China is a big place. Some parts, like Shenzhen, are a lot more liberal than others. They have lesbian and gay bars there, for example.
It's far from ideal but with the rate at which the US in particular is regressing...
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Have you somehow missed the race to lowest morality possible with a serial-liar, rapist, convicted criminal, fascist, sexist, etc. being voted to be US president?
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The US is most definitely not the first nation to put trade restrictions in place to protect sensitive technology. I know the Brits were doing similar well over a century ago. It's hardly something that makes a nation "pathetic".
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The Brits were doing it 300 years ago to try and prevent industrialization in certain overseas colonies. Worked out great for them.
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It very likely delayed things. Obviously the goal isnt permanent prevention, that would be impossible.
Re: "national security" my arse! (Score:1)
Excuse me, please report to your nearest NATO Information Center for your Correct Think (tm), citizen! You appear to be experiencing Bad Think. We can help!
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Taking prudent action to thwart a communist totalitarian regime isn't indicative of pathetic insecurity.
3x is not enough (Score:2)
You're part of the problem (Score:1)
Re: You're part of the problem (Score:1)
What would be their motivation to not let me leave (Score:2)
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What about WfH? I'd take Chinese money while living under Canadian law. I send them enough Canadian money for all the stuff I buy, it'd be nice to work on addressing the trade imbalance.
Obviously if I were top-tier engineering talent I'd have to worry about national security, but there's plenty of work they might want done that doesn't have to approach those lines.
Low pay in Eu (Score:2)
Great, let the global market sort out the actual value of engineers, who generate those $B for these companies. Europe, where ASML/Zeiss are headquartered, has ridiculously low engineering pay; US is already 3x for many of these roles. Laughable that an entry level engineer at these companies make what a McDonalds manager does in the US.
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Does that apply to engineers as well?
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The economy of said country is heavily slanted toward "existing while rich".
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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opin... [lemonde.fr]
I get it, if you base everything on whiny articles and reddit posts you would
Yeah but GDP is not telling the whole story (Score:2)
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It's essentially median income. In fact, one of the most common ways of estimating GDP is actually based on income. There are differences between GDP and the sum of income but they basically come down to some stuff corporations do and international money movement, and make income a better measure for what this thread is talking about. The measure that's actually used tends to be purchasing power parity, which corrects for cost of living in different places by computing exchange rates using actual products r
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OECD backs that up. [oecd.org]
Not sure what the source of your picture at the top of the link is.
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Ignoring that it's a non-sensical term. If we translate it, it precisely means: The median average domestic product per person.
The median of the average.... so, let's assume we've taken a series of all incomes, turned them into the average. The median is... well, it's the average. So is the 95th percentile, and the 5th.
What they want, is the median income. But that's not at al
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Hmm, maybe they'd be interested ... (Score:2)
... in this guy. [slashdot.org]
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ASML and Zeiss aren't American companies.
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U wot m8
Since when is all their IP licensed from American institutions? News to me.
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All EUV tech in the world is.
EUV LLC owns it, which is the corp spun up to hold the IP rights for the stuff the DOE funded US laboratories to invent.
They licensed it 2 to players, ASML ended up buying one, so now ASML is the sole licensee (and manufacturer) of EUV equipment.
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That seems like an oversimplication of the truth.
https://www.asml.com/en/news/s... [asml.com]
I'd have to poke around further, but it seems like a significant amount of R&D took place in the Netherlands and Japan as well. If for some reason EUV LLC wound up with all the IP from their joint venture with EUCLIDES then I'll be darned if I knew why.
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That seems like an oversimplication of the truth.
It's literally not.
ASML built the tech, but it was invented in the US with funding from the US Government. That's why that page you linked references the link to EUV LLC, the holder of the patents that ASML licenses.
I think maybe you read more into what I said than was intended.
Nobody's taking anything away from ASML- but they do license US tech to build their stuff.
I'd have to poke around further, but it seems like a significant amount of R&D took place in the Netherlands and Japan as well. If for some reason EUV LLC wound up with all the IP from their joint venture with EUCLIDES then I'll be darned if I knew why.
Of course it did. A patent isn't a working machine.
The research that led to EUV LLC precedes EUV LLC's incorporation, which precedes EUCLI
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Which is why they don't sell to China. [asml.com]
Recently, the Dutch government has also assertion additional oversight over their exports, so they must now comply with Dutch *and* US export controls.
Tough business to be in, but I guess since they bought up 100% of the competition... it's not too terrible.
Paying the door-welding premium (Score:2, Interesting)
Time was, young talent would be going to China because it was easy money and sort of a wild-west for oddball ideas.
I went to Shanghai about 10 years ago to visit and the architecture of the new construction rising above the commie-blocks looked like a design student's orgasm. Clearly someone somewhere always wanted to build a 100-storey skyscraper in the Greek classical style, but only in the China boom days did they get the chance.
Maybe the repression from the CCP could have been tolerated even to now had
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Pretty much everyone screwed up the COVID response, so pick your poison. There are a lot of people here with long COVID.
None of which really factors into most people's calculations. Big salaries, enough to retire on after a few years doing it, that's what they consider. The opportunity to build stuff from scratch, to command big budgets with no worry that some MBA will see an opportunity for a quarterly bonus and screw it all up.
China is relatively free and liberal compared to places like Dubai, and they ha
Re: Paying the door-welding premium (Score:2)
There are a lot of people here with long COVID.
If it hadn't been for covid, those same exact people would have been mysteriously afflicted by some other mystery condition that defies scientific study. Pick your poison, indeed.
James Bond (Score:3)
Re: NDA fraud? (Score:2)
This is the society we are (Score:2)
To live in modern society requires a certain amount of wealth.
The more wealth you have, the easier your life becomes. Beyond a certain point
enough wealth frees you from the day to day grind of obtaining it and allows you
to pursue a life that is worth living, not one spent forever grinding the treadmill of
employment making scraps while your employer reaps the big payout.
It then comes as no surprise that all China has to do is outbid Western corporations
when it comes to talent acquisition and they will get it