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There are many small corrupt countries in the world. Italy, like 100% of them, does not have IC industry or ASML machines and cannot plausibly seek to acquire them for any reason that's not a transparent «resell to China/Russia». Likewise for individual components.
Respectfully, I still believe you do not realize what modern IC manufacturing entails. Maybe it's your economic mindset where sound investment can always get transmogrified into goods, one way or another, more or less efficiently, because every input is commodified to some extent. One can't just buy a single machine: you need a city-scale stack to begin getting into it, a hefty slice of the global industry. China could do something with just a stepper, could at least try to reverse engineer it (try again, although they've failed before); but not Italy and not Morocco or whatever. Americans believe (incorrectly, IMO) that Chinese IC progress is an issue of existential risk, and will (correctly) parse this deal as sanction evasion, and shoot it down with extreme prejudice, just like they have shot down direct sales.
I have looked into it and the Chinese were making some progress at developing domestic alternatives to the harder bits; e.g. I loved this idea of using a particle accelerator as the radiation source, in place of ASML-style dark magic with a powerful laser beam punching tin droplets (it had been deemed impractical in the past, but so had propulsion landing on Earth...) But as you can see, this is still on the purely academic level; and the Chinese wouldn't be wracking their heads about sci-fi designs if they could make do with a little more corruption. By 2035, perhaps...
The US is not motivated to give them time until 2035.
I am extremely curious as to why nobody bothers or at least has shown the capability to do it. Some madlad from 4chan has apparently burned a github zeroday for NovelAI anime-tiddies-producing model. Frustratingly, only entertainment slop and data of citizens and governments of Bad Countries is liberated by courageous grassroots hackers (e.g. Gosuslugi or this stuff); locked things stay locked when big boys are invested in keeping them under lock and key. Admittedly, current gen AI is either opensource or experimental and mostly useless (far as I can tell), but there's little hope this will change in a year or so, when general models with industrial applications drop.
At least now we can produce dark elf tiddies on demand, while we wait for the winter to come.
As for Galkovsky, maybe we can discuss the nuances of his beliefs about Jews some other time.
I thought China already had Loongson as a homegrown CPU. It already shipped as part of the Lemote PCs, for over a decade now. Not remotely competitive with Western/Taiwanese offerings but able to maybe browse the web and host a service or two. Are(/were?) these not built in China?
I haven't watched this space closely. But the Chinese have long had modest-to-respectable successes with 16-12nm process, and I believe they can mass produce something close to Intel's 10 by this point, with good yields even for GPU-class chips (I may be optimistic).
What is important here is that the entirety of Chinese IC industry, no matter the process, is under attack due to the citizenship angle, and it is not lost on those people that sanctions have escalated a few times already; even if you're «safe» for now due to working on some obsolete process, it's clearly much safer to continue your career in the US. Of course there are other angles which are similarly harmful in the short term, but they are logistical, and thus in principle can be overcome.
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I thought you were gonna make the point that connections matter just as much as raw money (speaking of Italy, supercars are perhaps a good example: AIUI, you need connections or a good reputation to be able to buy something like a Ferrari).
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I think a wrinkle in your hypothesis, something Dase was trying to say above, is that even this theft only happens because the US et. al. don't/didn't give enough of a shit. Five years ago, nobody would have batted an eye over claims of China stealing IP. In a near-future where China is positioned as the next Soviet Union, however, that might change, to the point where anti-espionage efforts could become downright McCarthy-esque.
I for one think that a serious pivot towards New Cold War politics could very likely starve out social issues of political oxygen, starting at the higher echelons of US politics, and then cascading back down the levels until things like immigration, woke politics, etc. lose their salience.
I think that a serious pivot New Cold War will give big boost to the social issues. As Russia and China position themselves against wokeness and LGBTQ, Western bloc will turn them to the max to show the fascist Russians and Chinese. Anyone standing against wokeness would be seen as Communists and Communist sympathizers were seen in the 1950's.
"You are not gay or transgender yet? Are you a real patriot? Are you Russian agent or Chinese spy?"
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