I do low key support that though, because it means the west is going to stay complacent allowing China to develop peacefully instead of throwing us into WW3.

Oh lol, I see the press release uses the old projection of 576TB for LTO-14 but that has been scaled back because of the past few capacity misses. If you look at the diagram it now says 365TB. Tape is great in principle, but the shiny shoes running the LTO consortium prefer to make it super expensive and market it only to big companies. They also are staying with the same cartridge format between generations despite giving up on cross-generation compatibility. They are using super high tech tape formulations to get capacity increases while it apparently hasn't occurred to them to just make the cartridges bigger so they can put more tape in them. Oh well. Why tape? Because HDD's are complicated machines full of delicate mechanical and electronic stuff and they tend to fail if you don't keep them spinning. The lubricants dry out if you leave the drive sitting on a shelf for too long. So you keep them powered and online, and them a computer virus attacks them and exfiltrates or erases the data. While you can keep tape cartridges in a vault completely offline.

The most privileged companies will pay Trump and magically get access.

Torment Nexus: https://youtu.be/W_Qlb85JD_g

There is no way around needing helium, but China will boost their own production in time and they have access to helium from Russia as well. Meanwhile, the reason they can move so fast is due to having a centrally planned system the west rejects. It's the same reason Russia is now outproducing all of NATO in terms of weapons and ammunition. The west is in no position to recreate the necessary supply chains. Rare earths alone is a perfect example. I wrote about the problem in detail here if you're interested. Even under the most aggressive diversification scenarios, China is expected to retain 80% of global refining capacity by 2040. And that's just one example. The west has very little leverage at this point. Also, as she correctly points out, China doesn't need to get to ASML levels to make these fabs useful. As long as they're better than the current ones, that already means China will be producing better domestic chips. And they're also innovating with architecture as well such as Huawei's tau law design which folds the chip and dramatically improves performance. All these things work together. Finally, China is aggressively pursuing alternative computing substrates and some are already starting to come online. This is a recent example. These kinds of things have the potential to leapfrog silicon chips entirely. There's nothing comparable happening in the west because you can't do these kinds of projects without massive amount of state funding and direction to sustain them until they become profitable on their own.