Europe is pushing back on Washington’s chip war
Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to meet with Trade Minister Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the MATCH Acta bill that would deny Chinese chip makers access to Western semiconductor equipment, and a bill that would hit ASML particularly hard.
Based in the Netherlands, ASML is Europe’s most valuable company and the world’s only maker of the advanced lithography machines used to make advanced AI chips.
“It is exceptional that I come here to present our concerns in broad terms to Congress,” says Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the meetings. “The stakes for the Netherlands can be very high.”
China accounts for 19% of ASML’s net system sales. The MATCH Act would go beyond existing controls by expanding restrictions on ASML’s deep-ultraviolet immersion machines, on top of the long-standing ban on its most advanced extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) instruments reaching China.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can buy right now are older-generation deep-ultraviolet devices — equipment that first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines that the MATCH Act would now relegate as off-limits.
The bill, introduced in April, has not yet received a full vote in the House or Senate; Bloomberg notes that it will likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass.
