Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma flew to Washington this week to lobby against the MATCH Act, a bill that would bar Chinese chipmakers from buying Western semiconductor equipment and would hit ASML harder than any other company. China accounts for 19% of ASML's net system sales, and the Netherlands-based lithography maker is Europe's most valuable company. Sjoerdsma met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to argue the curbs go too far.
ASML is the only company in the world that builds the lithography machines used to fabricate cutting-edge AI chips, which gives the Dutch government an unusually direct stake in US export policy. Sjoerdsma told Bloomberg the trip itself was a signal of how serious the situation has become for the Netherlands.
The MATCH Act, introduced in April 2026, would extend US controls to ASML's deep ultraviolet immersion machines. That goes beyond the long-standing ban on shipping its most advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, tools to China. The deep ultraviolet line has been the workhorse of ASML's China revenue for years.
Key facts
- 01Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma met Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress this week to oppose the MATCH Act.
- 02China accounts for 19% of ASML's net system sales, making the bill a direct hit to Europe's most valuable company.
- 03The MATCH Act would extend curbs to ASML's deep ultraviolet immersion machines, on top of the existing EUV ban.
- 04The tools at stake are roughly a decade old, per ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet's May comments.
- 05Introduced in April 2026, the bill has not faced a full House or Senate vote and would likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass.
The specific machines at stake are not frontier tools. ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May that what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet systems first shipped about a decade ago. Those are the same machines the MATCH Act would now put off limits — a detail Dutch officials are pressing in Washington as evidence that the bill overreaches.
For ASML, the math is straightforward. Losing access to 19% of system sales would force a rapid rebalancing of the order book toward US, Korean, and Taiwanese customers, and would leave the company more exposed to capex cycles at TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. Those customers are already ASML's biggest, but the China revenue has been a useful hedge against any single fab slowing its buildout.
The political path for the MATCH Act is unclear. The bill has not yet faced a full House or Senate vote, and Bloomberg notes it would likely need to be folded into a larger legislative package to pass. That is a common fate for standalone export-control bills, which often ride along on defense authorizations or omnibus spending measures rather than moving on their own.
The Netherlands has its own export-control regime and has tightened it in coordination with Washington multiple times since 2023. Dutch officials have generally aligned with US objectives on EUV, but the message this week is that Congress acting unilaterally on deep ultraviolet — without parallel Dutch rulemaking — would put the burden of US policy squarely on a Dutch company's balance sheet.
ASML has not publicly commented on the MATCH Act lobbying push, but the company has consistently argued that older deep ultraviolet tools do not give China a path to leading-edge logic chips on their own. Fouquet's May framing — that the affected gear is roughly ten years old — is the technical version of the same argument Sjoerdsma is now making politically.
What is missing from the public record is any indication of whether Lutnick gave ground in the meetings. Commerce has been the lead agency pushing tighter equipment controls, and a standalone bill from Congress would, if anything, hand the department more leverage. The Dutch case rests on the argument that allied compliance is voluntary and that overreach erodes it.
For the AI chip supply chain, the immediate stakes are narrower than the headline suggests: even if the MATCH Act passes, China's path to advanced logic was already constrained by the EUV ban. The broader stake is whether Washington and its allies can keep a single, coordinated export-control regime, or whether unilateral US legislation starts producing the kind of allied pushback ASML's home government brought to Capitol Hill this week. That is the question Brussels and The Hague will be watching, and it is the one that will shape how the next round of chip controls gets written.
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