In southeastern Beijing, engineers at Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., China's top chipmaker, are working around the clock to expand the output of 14-nanometer and even 7-nm chips, just a few generations behind the world's leading chipmakers. Being able to make such advanced chips at all is a major breakthrough for a company that has been laboring under a U.S. blacklisting for five years.
But SMIC's mission goes beyond just making the chips. It wants to produce them entirely with Chinese equipment.
That goal -- a fully domestic chip equipment supply chain -- is laid out explicitly in the city's 14th Five-Year Plan, an economic roadmap for the capital, and the nation's chipmakers are pushing hard to make it a reality, even if it means sacrificing production quality and efficiency in the short term, sources tell Nikkei Asia.