A push in Washington to tighten the screws on China's chip industry is running into resistance from an unusual quarter: America's own allies. The Netherlands has gone so far as to send a cabinet minister to Capitol Hill to lobby against a U.S. bill that would restrict what Dutch chip-equipment champion ASML can sell to Chinese customers, TechCrunch reported.
The bill at the center
The legislation is the MATCH Act, which cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of what lawmakers called the largest export-control markup in the committee's history. It would press allies such as the Netherlands and Japan to align with U.S. restrictions and, critically, would extend curbs to a class of equipment that China can still buy legally today: deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion lithography machines.
Export controls are government rules that block the sale of specified technology to particular countries. In chips, the United States has used them to slow China's ability to make the most advanced semiconductors — the kind that power artificial intelligence and modern weapons. The most powerful tool, ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines, has been off-limits to China since 2019. DUV immersion machines are a step down — they print less advanced chips — but are still central to the "mature node" semiconductors used in cars, appliances and industrial gear, and China has been buying them in volume.
Why the Netherlands is alarmed
ASML, based in Veldhoven, is the only company in the world that builds the most advanced chipmaking machines, and it is Europe's most valuable listed company. China accounted for roughly 19% of ASML's system sales, according to figures cited by TechCrunch — a revenue stream a U.S. ban would directly threaten.
Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma traveled to Washington to make the case to lawmakers in person, an unusual step for a European official. The Dutch objection is not only commercial but constitutional in spirit: the bill, as drafted, would effectively let Washington dictate what a Dutch company, operating under Dutch law on Dutch soil, may do with its own products — what officials describe as an extraterritorial overreach.
Why European and American interests diverge
The American rationale is straightforward: deny China the tools to build advanced chips, slowing both its AI ambitions and its military modernization. Europe's calculus differs. European equipment makers built large, legal businesses in China long before the current tensions, and that revenue funds the research and capital spending that Europe is simultaneously trying to expand through the EU Chips Act — the bloc's 2023 law aimed at rebuilding domestic semiconductor capacity by 2030. Forcing European firms to walk away from China, Brussels argues, would undercut the very industrial base Europe is trying to strengthen, while leaving Europe to bear the cost of a policy set in Washington.
What's at stake
The MATCH Act has not become law; clearing a committee is only one step, and it would likely need to be folded into a larger package to advance. That leaves a window for European governments to lobby — which is exactly what the Dutch minister's visit was about.
The deeper risk is fragmentation. If Washington and Brussels cannot coordinate, the world could end up with competing rulebooks: one for firms that follow U.S. export-control frameworks, another for European companies operating under their own national licenses. That would complicate investment decisions across the chip industry and weaken controls that only work when major suppliers move together. For now, Europe's message to Congress is blunt: the chip war carries a price, and European industry did not agree to pay it.
