Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma traveled to Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the MATCH Act, a bill that would ban Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment and hit ASML particularly hard.
Netherlands-based ASML is Europe’s most valuable company and the world’s only manufacturer of sophisticated lithography machines used to create cutting-edge AI chips.
“It’s unusual for us to be here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress,” Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the meeting. “The risk in the Netherlands could be very high.”
China accounts for 19% of ASML Systems’ net sales. The MATCH Act would go further than existing controls and extend restrictions to ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion machines, in addition to a long-standing ban on ASML’s most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools from reaching China.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch last May, what China can now buy are previous-generation deep ultraviolet tools (equipment first launched about a decade ago), the same machines that are now banned under the MATCH law.
The bill, filed in April, has yet to pass a vote in the full House or Senate. Bloomberg points out that it would have to be folded into a larger package to pass.
