Dutch Trade Minister Sjord Sjøldsma is in Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to voice his opposition to the MATCH Act, a bill that would ban Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment and would hit ASML particularly hard.
Netherlands-based ASML is Europe’s most valuable company and the world’s only manufacturer of advanced lithography equipment used to make cutting-edge AI chips.
“It is unusual for us to come here to broadly convey our concerns to Congress,” Sjöldsma told Bloomberg after the meeting. “The risks for the Netherlands may be very high.”
China accounts for 19% of ASML’s net system sales. The MATCH Act would go further than existing regulations, expanding restrictions on ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion equipment in addition to a long-standing ban on advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools to China.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can now buy is an older generation of deep-UV tools (first shipped about 10 years ago), the same machines that are currently off-limits under the MATCH Act.
The bill was introduced in April, but has not yet passed a full vote in the House or Senate. Bloomberg notes that it will likely need to be folded into larger packages to pass.
