Europe is retreating from Washington’s chip war

Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoersma visited Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the MATCH Act, a bill that would block Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, a bill that would particularly 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 an extraordinary thing for me to come here to present our concerns so broadly to Congress,” Sjoersma told Bloomberg after the 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 told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep UV instruments — equipment that first shipped nearly 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.