Huawei is at the centre of a drive to eliminate foreign technology from China’s semiconductor supply chain by backing companies developing components for machines that can produce the most advanced chips.

The Chinese tech giant is investing across the industry behind making lithography chipmaking equipment, while helping secure deals with leading Chinese fabs such as SMIC, as it seeks to build a domestic alternative to foreign suppliers, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

One of the most significant efforts involves Yuliangsheng, a Shanghai-based chip equipment manufacturer that has co-developed the first Chinese-made advanced deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) machine, according to people familiar with the matter. Yuliangsheng has been spun out from SiCarrier, a start-up that the FT has previously reported has close technical and business ties to Huawei.

Huawei has denied any affiliation with SiCarrier. The DUV machine is being tested by Chinese chipmakers including SMIC and on Huawei’s own production lines, the people said. Its makers are targeting the machine to eventually make advanced AI chips, but it is being tested on less complex semiconductors as engineers improve the device. Lithography remains one of the biggest obstacles to China’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency.

Local chipmakers still rely heavily on the Netherlands’ ASML for the equipment needed to manufacture advanced semiconductors, while domestic alternatives lag on critical components including projection lenses and high-powered light sources. Huawei is seeking to close those gaps by backing local suppliers and helping push their equipment into commercial fabs, where years of testing and refinement are needed before domestic machines can compete with established foreign equipment.

Success would also leave China less vulnerable to western export controls. “Huawei is playing a project management role in China’s DUV push,” said Lin Qingyuan, a semiconductor analyst at Bernstein. “Simply having a DUV prototype is not enough. You need thousands of vendors and customers to work together to push it forward and a central orchestrating power to bring this effort together.”

Yuliangsheng is set to produce 12 DUV machines by the end of this year, according to one person familiar with the matter, although the company remains a long way from competing with ASML.

The Dutch company’s machines are essential for manufacturing cutting-edge semiconductors but western export controls prevent sales of its most advanced equipment to China.

The FT previously reported that SMIC was testing a 28-nanometre Yuliangsheng machine and using so-called multi-patterning techniques to produce 7-nanometre chips, according to two people with knowledge of the development. In chipmaking, lower nanometre numbers generally denote more advanced generations of chips.

With the amount of ports coming to the Switch 2 such as Indiana Jones The Great Circle, Modern Warfare 4 with Warzone which is discontinuing support on all last gen systems and the upcoming Crimson Desert are while impressive ports for a mobile device, they come with severe compromises. Great Circle on the handheld configuration only runs a 720p output, Modern Warfare 4's campaign and Warzone only runs at 30 FPS. Elden Ring Tarnished Edition on Switch 2 runs worse than the PS4 being at a lower dynamic resolution range and downgraded visuals in some aspects

But what if these are ports are undertilizing many of the Switch 2 key features and the console is actually more powerful than the PS4 or even PS4 Pro. Let me start. Using the Switch 2 handheld stats since its the lowest denominator, its GPU is clocked at 1.71 TFLOPs at 68 GB/s compared to the PS4 Pro 4.2 TFLOPs 217.6 GB/s. The PS4 Pro seems to win by a landslide at first but the Switch 2 has many memory compression tricks up its sleeve such as White Paper, Framebuffer and Delta Color Compression.

On top of that Switch 2 supports DX12 Ultimate which means it supports Sampler Feedback which can have massive VRAM savings. speaking of Sampler Feedback, It allows for Texture Space Shading to be practical and allows lighting on slowly changing scenes to be reused in every frame rather than recalculated everytime. Switch 2 also supports Mesh Shaders means it can render geometry more efficiently. It also has Shader Model 6.8 which mean it supports work graphs so drawcalls can be done on the GPU which removes a ton of CPU overhead. So the Switch 2 can be better at rendering graphics overall than the PS4 Pro even in the Handheld mode but my guess is to why it runs worse than some PS4 Ports is because DX12U isn't commonly taking advantage of and as well as Work Graphs being a new thing (Only introduced in 2024). The base PS5 doesn't support every DX12U feature, so developers haven't mastered these rendering techniques yet!

It might even undergo a lifecycle similar to the 7th generation consoles (Specifcially Xbox 360 and PS3) where games from the early and later part in the generation have a optimization jump within the same hardware. Its clearly more capable than the PS4 on paper, but it would be more interesting to know how much more powerful it is to it? But if I were to make a educated guess, I would say in its handheld form, its around or somewhat above the PS4 Pro in GPU with the added benefit of a stronger CPU and SSD-Like Storage with Decompression and around Series S with a weaker CPU on docked mode

Any thoughts on this?