In Brief Posted: 5:08 PM PDT · June 24, 2026 Image Credits: Lina Selg/Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Connie Loizos Europe is pushing back on Washington s chip war Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose the MATCH Act , a bill that would bar Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, and one that would hit ASML especially hard.

ASML, based in the Netherlands, is Europe s most valuable company and the only maker in the world of the sophisticated lithography machines that are used to make cutting-edge 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 accounts for 19% of ASML s net system sales.

The MATCH Act would go further than existing controls, extending curbs to ASML s deep ultraviolet immersion machines on top of the long-standing ban on its most advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, tools reaching China.

As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools — gear first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines the MATCH Act would now relegate as off-limits.

The bill, introduced in April, hasn t yet faced a full House or Senate vote; Bloomberg notes it would likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass.

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