Dutch Trade Minister Seord Seordsma visited Washington this week to meet with Trade Secretary Howard Lutnik and members of Congress to oppose PACKAGE Acta bill that would bar Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, and which would 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 produce advanced artificial intelligence chips.
“It is purely because I came here to present our problems to the Congress in a broad way,” said Sjördsma. Bloomberg said 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 restrictions on ASML’s UV immersion machines in addition to a long-standing ban on China’s most advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, instruments.
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said TechCrunch in May, China can now purchase older-generation deep-UV instruments—equipment first delivered about a decade ago—the very machines that the MATCH Act would now ban from use.
The bill, introduced in April, has yet to pass a full vote in the House or Senate; Bloomberg notes that it will likely require a larger package to pass.
