Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma traveled to Washington this week to meet with Trade Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress. MATCH ActThe bill, which barred Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, hit ASML particularly hard.
Based in the Netherlands, ASML is Europe’s most valuable company and the world’s only manufacturer of sophisticated lithography machines used to make state-of-the-art artificial intelligence chips.
Sjoerdsma said, “It is exceptional for me to come here to convey our concerns to the Congress at large.” told Bloomberg after meetings. “The stakes for the Netherlands could be very high.”
China accounts for 19% of ASML’s net system sales. The MATCH Act would go further than existing controls by expanding the borders to ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion machines on top of a long-standing ban on cutting-edge ultraviolet, or EUV, instruments reaching China.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fuquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep-ultraviolet instruments — gear that was first shipped nearly a decade ago — the same machines that the MATCH Act would now lift restrictions on.
The bill, introduced in April, has yet to face a vote in the full House or Senate; Bloomberg notes that it will likely have to fold into a larger package to pass.
