A teardown of Huawei's latest Kirin chip shows China's homegrown chipmaking is improving but still stuck well behind Taiwan and South Korea — bad news for Huawei, good news for TSMC and Samsung.

• Research firm TechInsights pulled apart the Kirin 9030 Pro and confirmed it uses SMIC's N+3 process, an upgraded version of 7nm.
• SMIC packed in more transistors than its previous generation, so progress is real.
• The chips are still clearly less dense than the 5nm chips TSMC and Samsung already sell in volume.
• The gap comes down to equipment: US export bans keep China from buying EUV machines, so SMIC is squeezing older DUV tools to their limit.

Outlook: China can keep inching forward without EUV, but the distance to the leading chipmakers is unlikely to close while the export bans hold.