# Introduction A reported attempt by a covert Chinese lab to reverse-engineer an EUV lithography scanner underscores that, despite access to scattered components, replicating ASML's EUV tools is effectively impossible without recreating the company's entire global supply chain, optics ecosystem, and proprietary software built over decades. # Technical context EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) is a technology used in chip production for creating electronic devices that are increasingly smaller and more efficient. The unit must be able to execute this process with extremely high precision. # Chinese challenge China has initiated a secret project to replicate the euv, but its lack of access to ASML's technologies and software has made the project impossible. # Experiment in peril This could be an important lesson for China, which will have to wait years before becoming operational,