Dutch Commerce Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to satisfy with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the MATCH Act, a invoice that might bar Chinese language chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor tools, and one that might hit ASML particularly arduous.
ASML, primarily based within the Netherlands, is Europe’s most beneficial firm and the one maker on this planet of the subtle lithography machines which are used to make cutting-edge AI chips.
“It’s distinctive that I’m coming right here to broadly define our issues to Congress,” Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the conferences. “The stakes for the Netherlands could also be very excessive.”
China accounts for 19% of ASML’s web system gross sales. The MATCH Act would go additional than current controls, extending curbs to ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion machines on high of the long-standing ban on its most superior excessive ultraviolet, or EUV, instruments reaching China.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet instructed TechCrunch in Could, what China can presently purchase are older-generation deep ultraviolet instruments — gear first shipped a couple of decade in the past — the identical machines the MATCH Act would now relegate off limits.
The invoice, launched in April, hasn’t but confronted a full Home or Senate vote; Bloomberg notes it will doubtless have to be folded into a bigger package deal to move.
