How Long Will It Take for China to Catch Up in Lithography and Wafer Manufacturing? Musk Predicts: Just 3 Years to Solve

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently gave an exclusive interview to China's state media CCTV, in which he admitted that his AI product Grok is "still several years behind Anthropic," but emphasized that Grok is growing very fast. He also expressed the view that China may be able to break through the bottlenecks in lithography technology and chip manufacturing within three years. According to foreign media outlet Wccftech, Musk acknowledged in mid-September that although the performance of the yet-to-be-released latest model Grok 4.8 has significantly improved, it still cannot compare with upstream's Astra and upstream's Fable models. The report stated that during the CCTV interview, Musk said the currently publicly available Grok 4.7 is a reliable work-oriented model, but still falls short of Anthropic's recently released Opus 5.5. He attributed part of the gap to the fact that xAI has only been in the AI field for about three years, while upstream has been developing for six years. "I expect we will most likely catch up to the frontier level next year. Grok Bot is currently growing about 100% per month, which is very fast." How big is the gap in China's chip manufacturing capabilities? Musk and supply chain executives have different views. Musk also discussed China's ability to develop its domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry, suggesting that China will resolve computing power constraints faster than most people expect. "My rough estimate is that China will need about 2 to 3 years to solve computing constraints through lithography and chip manufacturing technology." However, other industry executives hold different views. For example, Frank Rohmund, CEO of the semiconductor business at Germany's Zeiss, which produces high-end optical components for lithography machines, said in an interview that China's gap with Western countries in developing the latest EUV lithography machines "could be as much as 15 years."