Inside China’s plan to beat the US at big tech forever

To invoke the “Manhattan Project” is to summon a particular ghost: one of total mobilization, of scientists sequestered in secret rooms, of a national destiny forged in the heat of a singular, technological breakthrough by a threatened country. In the 1940s, the location was Los Alamos; in 2026, it is a secure laboratory in Shenzhen. Here, the objective is not a nuclear chain reaction, but the etching of light onto silicon at a scale so small it defies the physical properties of the air we breathe.

The technology is extreme ultraviolet lithography. To the uninitiated, it is a manufacturing process; to the Chinese state, it is the choke point that must be cleared if the nation is to thrive. For years, Washington operated under the assumption