what do you need to achieve sovereignty

The policy of vetoes, tariffs and sanctions applied by the United States to China regarding chips It has been a real catalyst for the Asian giant, which is transforming its semiconductor industry in record time with one goal: achieving technological sovereignty. And with China there is a shocking paradox: despite being the largest producer in terms of number of chips manufactured with 484,000 million units in 2024, it continues to depend technologically on the outside for the most strategic ones.

The context. Semiconductors need no introduction: they are essential for most industrial activities, including some as strategic as AI. Any country that wants to compete in technological leadership and national security knows that it must have sufficient and sufficiently advanced chips to develop all these areas.

The United States has designed export controls precisely to maintain that advantage, subjecting other countries to dependence and also so that China does not catch up. But with China it has had the opposite effect: it is no longer just that it has created a solid and growing national fabric, it is that with DeepSeek it has shown that it is capable of innovating even with hardware inferior to the competition.

Because It’s important. Beyond a history of brilliant industrialization, the relevance lies in what it would mean if China achieved technological sovereignty in chips: the balance of power in the global supply chain would change, both at the state and business levels.

Today it depends on players like TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix and ASML, but sooner or later they will lose their strategic advantage against Chinese competitors. And not only that: they will also lose the China market.

Some astronomical figures. What China is doing with its industry is technologically brutal and best of all, it is doing it against the clock:

The milestones that have been achieved. In addition to confirming how the industry is evolving quantitatively, there are also qualitative advances resulting from strong state investment, its great internal demand and external geopolitical pressure:

• They are moving away from depending on a single foreign supplier to build their own ecosystem, with Huawei in processors, Biren and Moore Threads in AI chips.
• Moore Threads, the “Chinese NVIDIA”, presented its Huashan AI chip at the end of 2024. According to the firmhas superior performance to NVIDIA’s Hopper architecture and is close to the Blackwell family.
• Changxin Memory Technology (CXMT) presented in November 2024 its advanced DDR5 DRAM memory, with speeds of up to 8,000 megabits per second and capacity of up to 24 gigabits per die, placing it on par with Samsung, SK Hynix or Micron.

Yes, but. All of the above is not enough: China still has bottlenecks and pending issues:

• Without a lithography machine to have your own EUVthere is no capacity to produce chips below seven nanometers in an efficient and scalable way. ASML remains irreplaceable in the short term.
• The Chinese EUV prototype is in the oven in a high-security laboratory in Shenzhen. It has been developed by a team of former engineers from the Dutch semiconductor company using reverse engineering. We will have to wait until 2028 (in the most optimistic scenario) to see it.
• While CXMT is going to start mass production of HBM3 high bandwidth memory this year, SK Hynix is ​​already going for the next generationHBM4. China is running, but its rivals are not standing still either.
• Not only machines are needed, but an entire ecosystem: chip design software, specialized materials, ultra-precision optics and engineering talent. Closing that gap is more difficult and slower than setting up a factory.

What’s coming now?. China does not step on the brakes: its 15th Five Year Plan for the period 2026-2030 explicitly calls for the adoption of “extraordinary” measures to encourage advances throughout the supply chain, including integrated circuits and high-end equipment, with the aim of achieving “decisive advances.” And it is doing so with an unprecedented economic injection and promoting supplier diversification.

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Cover | YesCarrier and Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra