China’s semiconductor industry has set itself a target that would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago: 80% domestic self-sufficiency in chips by 2030. The goal, proposed jointly by 13 leading industry executives and reported by Nikkei Asia, represents the most explicit statement yet of where China’s chip sector intends to be at the end of the current five-year planning cycle.
The baseline makes the ambition clear. According to Nikkei Asia, citing industry sources, China’s chip self-sufficiency rate, measured as the share of domestic semiconductor demand met by Chinese-designed and manufactured chips, stood at approximately 33% in 2024. Getting from one-third to four-fifths in six years would require transforming the industry’s scale, capability, and competitiveness beyond incremental progress.
The roadmap proposed by the 13 executives is specific in its technical targets. It calls for the construction and testing of production lines using fully domestically developed equipment for chips at the 7nm node, a level of precision that currently requires lithography tools that China does not yet produce domestically. It also sets a target of achieving stable, reliable production at 14nm, a node that Chinese foundries have been working to master but have not yet fully commercialized at scale.
The Semicon China trade show, held in Shanghai in late March, provided a window into how close the country’s equipment makers are to meeting these goals. AMEC, one of China’s leading chip equipment companies, demonstrated etching tools capable of supporting logic chip production at 5nm and below, a significant technical achievement that suggests the gap with international leaders is narrowing, even if it has not yet closed. AMEC’s chairman Gerald Yin said the company plans to increase the share of high-performance products it can supply in-house to over 60% within five to ten years.
Naura, China’s largest chip equipment maker, also showcased an expanded product lineup at the event, including new products incorporating nanometer-level technologies. The company has been on an acquisition drive, investing in Kingsemi in 2025 to broaden its capabilities. Together, AMEC and Naura represent the leading edge of China’s push to build a domestic semiconductor equipment industry — the most critical missing piece in the country’s chip self-sufficiency puzzle.
Advanced packaging has emerged as a parallel strategy to address remaining gaps in leading-edge lithography. Zheng Li, CEO of JCET Group — one of China’s largest chip packaging companies, told the South China Morning Post that the industry is moving toward what he described as “atomic level packaging,” targeting surface roughness below 0.2nm, compared with around 5nm in current 2.5D packaging. The argument is that by improving how chips are packaged and interconnected, Chinese manufacturers can extract greater performance from chips that may not match the transistor density of the most advanced foreign designs.
The remaining technology gap is real and should not be minimized. The most critical bottleneck is photolithography: ASML’s extreme ultraviolet machines, which are essential for manufacturing chips below 7nm, remain unavailable to Chinese buyers due to export controls imposed by the Netherlands under US pressure. Without access to EUV lithography, producing chips at the most advanced nodes using conventional approaches is not currently possible. The 7nm target in the roadmap implicitly acknowledges this constraint; it is achievable using deep ultraviolet lithography with multiple patterning, a more complex and expensive process that does not require EUV.
Whether the 80% target is achievable by 2030 is a question that analysts are divided on. What is not in doubt is the scale of the effort being made. China’s semiconductor industry is receiving massive state support, attracting top engineering talent, and making genuine technical progress. The gap with the global frontier is narrowing, even if it has not yet closed. For anyone tracking the US-China technology competition, the semiconductor story remains the most consequential front.