Europe is retreating from Washington’s chip war

Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to meet with Trade Minister Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the decision. Match lawIt is a bill that would prevent Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, and it is a bill that would especially hurt ASML.

ASML, based in the Netherlands, is Europe’s most valuable company and the world’s only manufacturer of cutting-edge lithography machines used to make cutting-edge AI chips.

“It is extraordinary that I come here to present our concerns so broadly before Congress,” Sjoerdsma said He told Bloomberg After meetings. “The risks for the Netherlands could be very high.”

China represents 19% of ASML’s net sales. The MATCH Act would go further than current controls, expanding restrictions on ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion machines as well as a long-standing ban on more advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, instruments arriving in China.

As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet TechCrunch said In May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep UV instruments — equipment that first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines that the MATCH Act will now keep off the border.

The bill, introduced in April, did not face a full vote in the House or Senate; Bloomberg notes that it will likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass.