According to BloombergU.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he was concerned that one of the Dutch chipmaker’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines — the EUV systems that are the only tools on Earth capable of printing the most advanced semiconductor patterns — may have ended up in China. That would be a major violation of export controls that have banned ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration.
It’s a serious claim. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML sent EUV-related parts and transport equipment to China, though they have repeatedly declined to show it — to Bloomberg or, apparently, to ASML itself. The company says there is no such machine in China and it never has been there. The Commerce Department did not respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil.
You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. ASML is a Dutch company that most people have never heard of, but they are, by far, the most important company in the global AI buildout that isn’t called Nvidia or one of the hyperscalers. It makes the only machines on the planet capable of EUV lithography — the process of printing the tiny circuit patterns that define the most advanced chips.
Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia and Apple chips, depends on ASML tools that have taken the company roughly two decades and countless billions to develop. There is currently no second supplier. That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization trading close to $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past year on insatiable demand for AI-powered chips.
This scale is precisely why the China issue matters so much. If even one EUV machine found its way into the hands of the Chinese, it would represent one of the most consequential breaches of the export control regime the US has created in recent years to keep advanced artificial intelligence capability away from Beijing’s military and industrial base.
I sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, long before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China issue.
Fouquet told me that ASML tracks every machine ever shipped — whether they are in active use with tracked customers or have been dismantled and returned to the company. He said the company built an internal firewall years ago: Employees who can access EUV technology, documentation and training are shut out from those who can’t, and ASML’s China-based staff sit on the wrong side of that wall by design. He argued that the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the only truly new problem—producing EUV light on its own—took 20 years alone. His broader point seemed to be that you can’t reverse engineer a machine you’ve never had and no one in China has.
There is also a simpler commercial logic that cuts through the idea that ASML would risk its export license to quietly weaponize a Chinese customer. ASML has been selling China older-generation deep-UV tools — equipment first released a decade ago — but Fouquet explicitly framed that as a protective calculation, not a loophole. The idea, he suggested, is that it maintains enough of a generation gap that customers can still do business — but without building its own future competitor. ASML expects about 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already permitted sales in China. Risking a full EUV ban would put that revenue, and the company’s position as the most valuable monopoly in the European industry, at risk for an illegal sale.
None of this proves the claims are false. The government has yet to release its evidence, and it deserves not to be judged until it does.
The Commerce Department, under Lutnick’s leadership, agreed late last year to commit up to $150 million in taxpayer money to xLight, a startup developing a next-generation light source technology that has been written as a long-term challenge to ASML’s core EUV monopoly. xLight’s CEO told me last year that the company sees itself as ASML’s future partner, not a rival, a building block meant to connect ASML’s machines rather than replace them. When I pitched this framing to Fouquet in May, he was nice about it, but not convinced. ASML, it has made clear, does not see itself needing xLight’s technology to maintain its lead.
Does this have anything to do with why Lutnick is suddenly pushing ASML to EUV? Nothing public connects these two. It could be completely unrelated. But a federal official who controls a monopoly while his own company has money for a startup to improve that monopoly’s core technology deserves scrutiny.
xLight is not the only outside bet on the future of lithography. Peter Thiel — who has his own long-standing ties to Trump’s political orbit — has supported substratea separate startup that is explicitly pursuing its own competitive EUV technology, with ambitions to compete with ASML more directly than xLight intends to do.
As Bloomberg notes, a bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go much further than EUV — it calls for an effective ban on all shipments of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (DUV) to China, the less advanced lithography tools that account for about a fifth of the company’s expected revenue in 2026. The bill passed a key committee in April, and the Trump administration has not taken an official position on of this.
Pictured above: ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet.
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