You don’t always have to be the best. Sometimes being good enough is the first step to winning

In a few months, India will make its first home-grown computer chip. It won’t be a very advanced one. It will be a 90-nanometre (90nm) chip, meant for simple jobs. China, however, has gone much further. It has started making machines that can produce advanced chips. That is a huge achievement.

Making these machines is incredibly difficult. Even the US depends on a Dutch company called ASML for most of them. A few years ago, the US stopped ASML from selling its best machines to China. The idea was to slow down China’s progress in technology.

China didn’t give up. It decided to build its own machines. It spent heavily on research, copied ideas by studying existing technology, and even hired experts away from foreign companies. Today, its machines are not as good as the world’s best, and they still have to prove themselves. But they are good enough to keep China’s chip industry running, even if other countries refuse to sell it what it needs.

China plans to build five of these machines this year and twenty next year. Surprisingly, the project is being led by a government-owned company. It shows that state-run companies can still do important work if they are given the right support.

The same lesson can be seen in artificial intelligence. Chinese AI models are usually not considered the world’s best, but they are much cheaper. Because they are good enough for many jobs, more and more people are using them. Sometimes, being affordable and reliable matters more than being perfect.

There is an important lesson here for India. We don’t have to wait until everything is perfect before moving ahead. Our first chip may be simple, but we should quickly move on to better ones—90nm, then 28nm, then even more advanced chips. The same goes for AI. If we aim higher and work harder, we can catch up much faster.

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