What prevents countries from producing advanced chips and tooling? What's so difficult about it?

Currently, Taiwan produces the overwhelming majority of semiconductor devices at the most advanced process nodes. Meanwhile, Dutch company ASML is the sole source of the extreme UV lithography devices that are needed to produce these chips.

What's preventing other countries from bootstrapping their way up to being able to produce these devices? China and India aren't exactly lacking in industrial capacity and access to natural resources. Both countries have pretty robust educational systems, and both are able to send students abroad to world-class universities. Yet China is "only" able to produce chips at the 14nm process node, while India doesn't have any domestic fabs at all. And neither country has any domestic lithography tooling suppliers that I'm aware of.

EDIT
Also, I'm 100% certain that China would have an extensive espionage operation in Taiwan. TSMC and other companies aren't operated by the Taiwanese government, and so wouldn't be subject to the same security measures as a government research lab. China must have obtained nuggets of research data over the years.

Where are AMD Ryzen chips made?

Taiwan

It was only August last year that AMD released the Ryzen 9000, including the Ryzen 7 9700X, using 4nm silicon for the chip's CPUs made by TSMC's Taiwan factories, aslo known as the TSMC N4 node. So, moving some of that production to the Arizona fab so soon certainly looks like a vote of confidence in the facility.Jan 10, 2025