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.

i fear that; by the time they do get this working at scale; the west will have recreated the industries that were crushed by china's rare earth mineral control and will have all the leverage because of helium.

if that happens, china's microelectronic industry is going to so the same way that the soviet's went -- nothing more than an historical footnote with interesting findings.