Go bet on it @=^D It's not speculation, it's what they sell to the world and build processors for globally available Huawei/Honor phones. It's not a secret.
If they had a solution to get to >90% yields on sub 5nm they'd be doing it now. They don't, even the 7-10nm isn't there. Best hope is they get to buy the entire world's supply of EUV in 2027, then they install all of them, then they bring them up, then they build processes around them and make masks, then they ramp the yield on 3-4nm by copying exact TSMC.
The hilarious thing is that TSMC couldn't do this at a new fab in Taiwan, with full access to equipment, supply chain, and people. So, nope.
What is "@=^D"?
Thinking on, I agree 1-2 years was too optimistic. Even if they have the tech right now already, building a fab itself within 2 years is tight, but I think doable. Maybe not at full capacity but at least functioning. It's possible they can start building the fab infra in parallel with acquiring EUV tech speculatively to speed it up.
Like the other person said, within 4-5 years is more reasonable.
give them 4-5 years, given the amount of knowledge leak between China, Taiwan and South Korea and the amount of research budget put in replacing ASML tools, it's gonna come faster than we expect for sure.
From that point onwards, we'll buy Chinese hardware or be left behind
To steel man the argument, I think that there really is a Moore's Cliff coming. I don't think that resolution is going to matter as much, although process/design knowledge will still be a huge barrier. I don't see even 10A being as big a node as 14A or 2nm. Too many things fall apart all at once, and the cyclical nature of semi will raise it's bloody head above the industry as the AI trade bursts. So many $10Bs will be spent and margins will plummet... again, just in time for China to catch up.
Already, the big capabilities are becoming multi-layer/die integration. Whether it's BSPDN, stacked die, optical interconnects, etc it won't be as simple as Denard scaling. It will be dependent on experience and supply chains, which are harder to transfer than equipment or IP.
I do think the market for inference will drive a lot of innovation, and a lot of that will be at larger nodes. A single reticle die masked ROM with CIM can do 7B at 6nm. At 2-3nm you can do 27-32B which is a single expert or router. At that point there's not much reason to shrink for AI since it's mostly 1-hot die per token (except for the router). Update the parameters every 3-6mo when a new frontier comes out, and take the cost/power savings to the bank.