Investment will be made, but how many years will it take for the facility to become operational?
Micro Electronics and Rare Earth Elements Sectors
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Japan’s Proterial bets big on India with ₹2,250 crore rare earth manufacturing facility in Andhra Pradesh
India is set to strengthen its position in the rare earth manufacturing sector with a major investment from Japanese materials company Proterial. The company plans to establish a permanent magnet manufacturing facility in Andhra Pradesh with an investment of ₹2,250 crore. The project is expected...
Japan company to set up rare earths magnet unit in Andhra Pradesh
Japan's Proterial will invest ₹2,250 crore to build a rare earth magnet plant in Andhra Pradesh. This facility will produce vital components for electric vehicles and wind turbines. The move aims to boost India's local rare earth value chain. It also reduces dependence on Chinese sources. This...
ASML denies selling EUV chipmaking tool to China after report of US concern
Chip-equipment maker ASML (ASML.AS), opens new tab said on Friday it had never shipped an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine to China, after a report that U.S. officials were concerned one of the company's most advanced tools may have reached the country.
"ASML has never shipped an EUV machine to China nor have we shipped to China any component, module or equipment specially designed to be used in an EUV machine," the chipmaker told Reuters in an emailed statement.
Bloomberg News earlier reported that U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had raised concerns that ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV machines, may have reached China in violation of U.S.-led export restrictions.
Lutnick expressed the concerns to senior leaders of the Dutch company in a series of meetings, the report added.
ASML said it has refuted allegations regarding non-compliance with export controls concerning China, adding that it has "consistently adjusted its business to any development in export controls to comply to any new rules".
ASML's most advanced EUV systems are roughly the size of a school bus and weigh 180 tons.
"When it comes to the export of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the Netherlands works with clear rules and control lists, based on the European Dual-Use Regulation and additional national measures," the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in an emailed statement.
"All equipment, components and technology that explicitly fall under these rules require a licence," the ministry said, adding that it enforces this policy very strictly and "steps in where necessary".
The U.S. Commerce Department and the White House were not immediately available for comment outside business hours when contacted by Reuters.
In April, Washington proposed a law requiring U.S. allies to align with its export controls to curb China's ability to make advanced semiconductors, with equipment made by ASML named in the legislation.
Reuters reported in December that Chinese scientists have developed a prototype of an EUV machine that was built by a team of former engineers from ASML, an effort described as China's version of the Manhattan Project.
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Given that China is on the verge of a breakthrough in EUV technology, running such propaganda now could lead those unfamiliar with the field to believe that the subsequently unveiled domestically produced Chinese EUV machine is yet another product of 'technology theft.'
China tightens indium export checks as AI demand increases
China is stepping up scrutiny over exports of indium, leading some buyers to fear the niche metal, sought after for next-generation data centers, may be added to the export control regime that has become one of Beijing's most potent trade weapons.
China produces nearly 70% of the world's indium, a byproduct of zinc refining mostly used in displays and solder but also the raw material for making indium phosphide, used to make high-speed optical chips for AI data centers.
Beijing put indium phosphide on an export control list in February 2025 and the restrictions have become enough of a hurdle for next-generation data centers that the CEO of Nvidia-backed chipmaker Coherent traveled to Beijing with President Donald Trump in May to raise the issue.
While indium metal is not on the export control list, two buyers told Reuters about growing scrutiny over their purchases from Chinese customs. For the first time this year, a European buyer was asked to disclose information about end users, including where they were based.
A major buyer in North America said approvals had gone from same day to several days, which they attributed to more scrutiny of paperwork and described as "tense". This buyer had not been asked for extra information by customs.
China's Ministry of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment on a public holiday.
All the buyers declined to be named owing to the sensitivity of the topic.
The extra due diligence is not uniform and two other buyers told Reuters they had heard of extra scrutiny but not faced it themselves. So far, Reuters has not identified any shipments that have been blocked.
Nonetheless there is some concern in the small industry that this is a prelude to tighter controls or the end-user disclosures which China, and other countries with export control regimes, use to chart global supply chains and chokepoints.
Indium has been identified as a potential vulnerability for the U.S., whose Defense Logistics Agency earlier this year released a request for proposals to stockpile up to 403 tons of the material over three years.
Another North American buyer said they suspected that the reporting requirements were "a precursor to restrictions or outright bans on exports."
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The US says ASML’s top chip tool may be in China, but how?
According to Bloomberg, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he’s concerned that one of the Dutch chipmaker’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the EUV systems that are the only tools on Earth capable of printing the most advanced semiconductor patterns — may have ended up in China. That would be a major breach of export controls that have barred ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration.
It’s a serious claim. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China, though they’ve declined, repeatedly, to show it — to Bloomberg or, apparently, to ASML itself. The company says no such machine exists in China and has never existed there. The Commerce Department didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil.
You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. ASML is a Dutch company most people have never heard of, but it is, by a wide margin, the most important company in the global AI buildout that isn’t named Nvidia or one of the hyperscalers. It makes the only machines on the planet capable of EUV lithography — the process of printing the microscopic circuit patterns that define the most advanced chips.
Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia’s and Apple’s chips, depends on ASML tools that took the company roughly two decades and untold billions to develop. There is, at present, no second supplier. That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization that has been trading in the neighborhood of $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past year on the back of insatiable AI-driven chip demand.
That scale is exactly why the China question matters so much. If even one EUV machine made it into Chinese hands, it would represent one of the most consequential breaches of the export-control regime the U.S. has built over the past several years to keep advanced AI capability out of Beijing’s military and industrial base.
I sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question.
Fouquet told me ASML tracks every machine it has ever shipped — they’re either in active use with monitored customers or have been dismantled and returned to the company. He said the firm built an internal firewall years ago: Employees who can access EUV technology, documentation, and training are walled off from those who can’t, and ASML’s China-based staff sit on the wrong side of that wall by design. He argued the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine at all was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the one genuinely new problem — generating EUV light itself — took 20 years on its own. His broader point seemed to be that you can’t reverse-engineer a machine you’ve never had, and nobody in China has had one.
There’s also a simpler commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to quietly arm a Chinese customer. ASML does sell older-generation deep ultraviolet tools to China — gear it first shipped a decade ago — but Fouquet framed that explicitly as a protective calculation, not a loophole. The idea, he suggested, is that it keeps enough of a generational gap that customers can still do business — but without manufacturing its own future competitor. ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales to China. Risking the EUV ban entirely would put that revenue, and the company’s standing as the most valuable monopoly in European industry, on the line over a single illegal sale.
None of this proves the allegations are false. The government hasn’t yet made its evidence public, and it’s worth withholding judgment until it does.
The Commerce Department, under Lutnick’s leadership, agreed late last year to put up to $150 million of taxpayer money into xLight, a startup developing a next-generation light-source technology that’s been written about as a long-term challenge to the core of ASML’s EUV monopoly. xLight’s own CEO told me last year that the company sees itself as a future partner to ASML, not a rival, building hardware meant to plug into ASML’s machines rather than replace them. When I put that framing to Fouquet in May, he was polite about it but unconvinced; ASML, he made clear, doesn’t see itself as needing xLight’s technology to keep its lead.
Does that have anything to do with why Lutnick is suddenly pressing ASML on EUV? Nothing public connects the two. It could be entirely unrelated. But a federal official scrutinizing a monopoly while his own agency has money riding on a startup angling to improve that monopoly’s core technology is worth examining.
xLight isn’t the only outside bet on the future of lithography. Peter Thiel — who has his own long-running ties to Trump’s political orbit — has backed Substrate, a separate startup explicitly pursuing its own EUV-rival technology, with ambitions to compete with ASML more directly than xLight says it intends to.
As Bloomberg notes, a bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go much further than EUV — it calls for an effective ban on all of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) shipments to China, the less advanced lithography tools that account for roughly a fifth of the company’s expected 2026 revenue. The bill cleared a key committee in April, and the Trump administration hasn’t taken a formal position on it.
techcrunch.com
So US is trying to control ASML, would it be transfered to US just like TSMC？
According to Bloomberg, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he’s concerned that one of the Dutch chipmaker’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the EUV systems that are the only tools on Earth capable of printing the most advanced semiconductor patterns — may have ended up in China. That would be a major breach of export controls that have barred ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration.
It’s a serious claim. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China, though they’ve declined, repeatedly, to show it — to Bloomberg or, apparently, to ASML itself. The company says no such machine exists in China and has never existed there. The Commerce Department didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil.
You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. ASML is a Dutch company most people have never heard of, but it is, by a wide margin, the most important company in the global AI buildout that isn’t named Nvidia or one of the hyperscalers. It makes the only machines on the planet capable of EUV lithography — the process of printing the microscopic circuit patterns that define the most advanced chips.
Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia’s and Apple’s chips, depends on ASML tools that took the company roughly two decades and untold billions to develop. There is, at present, no second supplier. That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization that has been trading in the neighborhood of $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past year on the back of insatiable AI-driven chip demand.
That scale is exactly why the China question matters so much. If even one EUV machine made it into Chinese hands, it would represent one of the most consequential breaches of the export-control regime the U.S. has built over the past several years to keep advanced AI capability out of Beijing’s military and industrial base.
I sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question.
Fouquet told me ASML tracks every machine it has ever shipped — they’re either in active use with monitored customers or have been dismantled and returned to the company. He said the firm built an internal firewall years ago: Employees who can access EUV technology, documentation, and training are walled off from those who can’t, and ASML’s China-based staff sit on the wrong side of that wall by design. He argued the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine at all was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the one genuinely new problem — generating EUV light itself — took 20 years on its own. His broader point seemed to be that you can’t reverse-engineer a machine you’ve never had, and nobody in China has had one.
There’s also a simpler commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to quietly arm a Chinese customer. ASML does sell older-generation deep ultraviolet tools to China — gear it first shipped a decade ago — but Fouquet framed that explicitly as a protective calculation, not a loophole. The idea, he suggested, is that it keeps enough of a generational gap that customers can still do business — but without manufacturing its own future competitor. ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales to China. Risking the EUV ban entirely would put that revenue, and the company’s standing as the most valuable monopoly in European industry, on the line over a single illegal sale.
None of this proves the allegations are false. The government hasn’t yet made its evidence public, and it’s worth withholding judgment until it does.
The Commerce Department, under Lutnick’s leadership, agreed late last year to put up to $150 million of taxpayer money into xLight, a startup developing a next-generation light-source technology that’s been written about as a long-term challenge to the core of ASML’s EUV monopoly. xLight’s own CEO told me last year that the company sees itself as a future partner to ASML, not a rival, building hardware meant to plug into ASML’s machines rather than replace them. When I put that framing to Fouquet in May, he was polite about it but unconvinced; ASML, he made clear, doesn’t see itself as needing xLight’s technology to keep its lead.
Does that have anything to do with why Lutnick is suddenly pressing ASML on EUV? Nothing public connects the two. It could be entirely unrelated. But a federal official scrutinizing a monopoly while his own agency has money riding on a startup angling to improve that monopoly’s core technology is worth examining.
xLight isn’t the only outside bet on the future of lithography. Peter Thiel — who has his own long-running ties to Trump’s political orbit — has backed Substrate, a separate startup explicitly pursuing its own EUV-rival technology, with ambitions to compete with ASML more directly than xLight says it intends to.
As Bloomberg notes, a bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go much further than EUV — it calls for an effective ban on all of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) shipments to China, the less advanced lithography tools that account for roughly a fifth of the company’s expected 2026 revenue. The bill cleared a key committee in April, and the Trump administration hasn’t taken a formal position on it.
The US says ASML's top chip tool may be in China, but how? | TechCrunch
There's a commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to arm a Chinese customer.
techcrunch.com
So US is trying to control ASML, would it be transfered to US just like TSMC？
T
Never going to happen.
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Rare Earth Elements: Specialized Materials Used in Modern Technology, Defence, Green Transition
Rare Earth Elements: Specialized Materials Used in Modern Technology, Defence, Green Transition
Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are a group of 17 chemically similar metallic elements ...
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France pitches processing partnership for India's rare earth ambitions
French official says India should invest in rare earth processing and refining before domestic mines start production, while expanding technology, financing and research partnerships
NVLink Fusion equips cloud providers with an easy path to using Nvidia's rack-scale systems and networking platforms with any ASIC or other accelerator.
Is Optical Scale-Up Finally Approaching?
NVLink Fusion hints that optics may be moving inside the rack
Currently, most data centers use both electronic and optical communication protocols, for different tasks. Scale-out networks connect thousands of AI computers across a data center, making optics the obvious choice for long distances. Scale-up networks connect several GPUs inside a single mega-computer or rack, where latency is critical, and dense copper interconnects, such as Nvidia’s NVLink, have long been the engineering solution of choice.
That distinction is beginning to blur, and Nvidia may be quietly dipping its toes in the water of optics for a scale-up. In 2025, the company introduced NVLink Fusion, a program that allows hyperscalers and cloud providers to build custom AI systems around Nvidia’s scale-up fabric. This summer, the company’s list of partners has grown to include several photonics players such as Ayar Labs, Marvell Technologies, and Lightmatter.
As AI needs grow, the number of GPUs and the bandwidth of connections between them continues to grow. Electrical links are being pushed toward terabit-per-second signaling. But higher frequencies increase attenuation, power consumption, and heat. To cope, copper cables must become shorter and thicker, making it more difficult to route them through crowded server racks. At the same time, Nvidia is planning to add even more processors to single interconnected systems, going from 72 GPUs today to as many as 576 by 2027.
“The physics of copper just changes as you increase the frequency of the signals going across that copper,” says Nvidia principal product marketing manager Jesse Clayton. “You can mitigate that by limiting the length of the cable, and right now all of our copper cabling is within that single NVL72 rack, so the distances aren’t that long, but we are getting close to the limits of what we can push.”
Engineers call this the “copper wall.” Many now believe that keeping up with AI will eventually require moving optical interconnects closer to the processors themselves.
Bringing optics to the GPU
To move data as light, engineers must figure out how to convert electrical signals into optical ones, then integrate lasers, photonic devices, and electronic chips into a single package without blowing up cost, power consumption, or manufacturing complexity.Those hurdles are no longer insurmountable.
“More than any other time that I recall, I think it’s concluded that the co-packaged optics will happen,” says Keren Bergman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University.
Ayar Labs, one of the photonics companies participating in the NVLink Fusion ecosystem, has developed optical chiplets meant to sit alongside GPUs and other processors, converting electrical signals into light only millimeters from the compute silicon. “The most optimal way to do that is having a photonic chiplet with an electronic chiplet and having them hybrid bonded together,” says Ayar’s director of product management, Vishal Chandrasekar.
He argues that optical scale-up has become practical because the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem has matured around co-packaged optics. Advances in hybrid bonding now allow electronic and photonic chiplets to be manufactured separately, then integrated into a single optical engine that sits beside GPUs or switches.
“What has really happened in the last few years is that the process maturity coming out of the fabs has really improved,” Chandrasekar says. He believes the industry is now on a path toward high-volume optical scale-up systems within the next couple of years.
Lightmatter has a different solution. Rather than placing optical chiplets beside processors, the company is building a photonic interposer that serves as the packaging substrate itself. The idea is that future processors could be stacked directly on top of a silicon photonics engine. Vice president of product Roy Kim describes these interposers and optical chiplets as “complementary steps in the photonics road map.”
According to Kim, packaging is no longer the main obstacle. With standard foundries and assembly partners, optical interconnects can now be manufactured, tested, and integrated in ways that look a lot more like conventional chip production, he says.
The remaining challenge is laser integration. Today’s pluggable laser modules take up valuable rack space and are hard to scale. Instead, Lightmatter is putting large numbers of lasers directly onto silicon, which Kim believes could soon support much denser optical scale-up fabrics.
The future of optical scale-up
Nvidia, for its part, is taking a gradual approach to adopting these technologies. Clayton says the company expects optics to move into scale-up networking eventually, as AI’s bandwidth requirements continue to grow.“I think we’ve taken an approach of migrating to optical when it makes the most sense for our platform,” he says. “If you migrate the entire platform at once, you take a tremendous amount of risk on new designs. So, starting at the scale-out space, and then in the future moving to scale-up is kind of a sensible, measured approach from our perspective.”
That slow-and-steady attitude is one reason why some researchers view NVLink Fusion as more than an interoperability play. “The Fusion is sort of this umbrella—you can put copper in it, you can put photonics in it. It’s very photonics friendly,” Bergman says. Rather than committing Nvidia to a specific interconnect technology, she says, Fusion creates an ecosystem in which electrical and optical approaches can evolve side by side.
Not everyone expects photonics to become the only answer. Researchers continue to improve electrical interconnects through advances in signaling, packaging, and transceiver design. And other groups are pursuing alternative technologies.
Underneath all these advances is a bigger issue: Can optical scale-up become something the industry at large can do, rather than a proprietary feature of Nvidia’s ecosystem?
“Absolutely,” Chandrasekar says. “There are going to be multiple implementations in the 2028 time frame in very high volume.”
If that happens, future AI systems could span multiple racks while behaving as a single computing domain, connected via a mix of electrical, optical, and perhaps other emerging technologies.
Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion Quietly Pushes Optics Inside the Rack
NVLink Fusion hints that optics may be moving inside the rack
spectrum.ieee.org
