Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and congressional leaders to oppose the MATCH Act—a bill that would prohibit Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment and would severely impact ASML.
ASML, headquartered in the Netherlands, is Europe’s most valuable company and the sole manufacturer of the sophisticated lithography machines that produce next‑generation AI chips.
“It’s exceptional that I’m coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress,” Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg after the meetings. “The stakes for the Netherlands may be very high.”
China represents 19 % of ASML’s net system sales. The MATCH Act would expand existing controls by extending curbs to ASML’s deep‑ultraviolet immersion tools in addition to the longstanding ban on its most advanced extreme‑ultraviolet (EUV) equipment, which already limits Chinese access.
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May that what China can currently purchase are older-generation deep‑ultraviolet tools—ships first released about a decade ago—which the MATCH Act would now bar from reaching the Chinese market.
Introduced in April, the bill has yet to receive a full House or Senate vote; Bloomberg notes it would likely need to be incorporated into a larger package to pass.
