source: techcrunch ai: europe is pushing back on washington’s chip war
level: business
dutch trade minister sjoerd sjoerdsma visited washington this week to meet with commerce secretary howard lutnick and members of congress. he opposes the match act, a bill that would bar chinese chipmakers from accessing western semiconductor equipment. the bill would hit asml especially hard. asml, based in the netherlands, is europe's most valuable company and the only maker of sophisticated lithography machines used to make advanced ai chips.
china accounts for 19% of asml's net system sales. the match act would go further than existing controls. it would extend curbs to asml's deep ultraviolet immersion machines on top of the long-standing ban on its most advanced extreme ultraviolet tools reaching china. asml ceo christophe fouquet said in may that what china can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools, gear first shipped about a decade ago. the match act would make these machines off-limits.
the bill, introduced in april, hasn't yet faced a full house or senate vote. it would likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass. sjoerdsma told bloomberg after the meetings that it was exceptional for him to come and broadly outline concerns to congress, and that the stakes for the netherlands may be very high.
why it matters: restricting asml's sales to china could disrupt the global ai chip supply chain and affect the availability of advanced manufacturing tools.
source: techcrunch ai: europe is pushing back on washington’s chip war