ASML is an essential piece in the technological and commercial war that the US and China are fighting to gain world supremacy. This company from the Netherlands is, at the moment, the only one capable of manufacturing the equipment extreme ultraviolet photolithography (UVE) that use TSMC, Samsung, Intel or SK Hynix to produce your cutting-edge chips.
This absolute bottleneck position explains why the Netherlands’ formal accession to the Pax Silica initiative, the US-led semiconductor bloc to reduce dependence on China, is one of the most relevant geostrategic movements of 2026.
Pax Silica, or “Silicon Peace”, was born in December 2025 at the initiative of the US State Department with a very clear objective: to build semiconductor supply chains, artificial intelligence (AI) and rare earths unlinked from China.
The trap of being essential
This bloc started with seven signatory countries and has been adding accessions until reaching sixteen members. The Netherlands participates from the beginning, but with the status of non-signatory partner. This week Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma traveled to Washington to finalize the official accession in a meeting with Trade Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The problem is that this firm has not put an end to the friction. Sjoerdsma acknowledged before the press that both countries share the goal of preventing sensitive technology reach dangerous handsbut he was also very explicit in his rejection of MATCH law (Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware o Multilateral Alignment of Technological Controls in Hardware).
“The starting point for the Netherlands is that each country is responsible for its own laws,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma.
This bipartisan proposal would force companies like ASML to stop maintaining even machines already delivered to China under the threat of losing access to American components, software, and customers. “The starting point of the Netherlands is that each country is responsible for its own laws,” declared Sjoerd Sjoerdsma.
The trade and technology war between Washington and Beijing has been escalating for years. The US vetoed Huawei and ZTE in its government agencies in 2019, expanded export controls of semiconductors in 2022 under the mandate of Joe Biden and approved the sale of some Nvidia GPUs to China in 2026. Beijing responded by restricting access to its rare earths and manufacturing industry.
The result was paradoxical: a boom of domestic chip production in China and, in parallel, a buoyant smuggling industry that ended up with several executives of American companies in jail. Pax Silica and the MATCH Act are the most ambitious and most coercive version of this decoupling strategy.
For the Netherlands, this scenario does not have a clean exit. ASML is not only its most valuable company: it is the reason why an economy of 18 million people influences global politics of supply chains much deeper than its size corresponds to.
Without their SVU lithography machines, chipmakers like TSMC, Micron or Samsung would not be able to produce the cutting-edge hardware they make today. But that same relevance makes ASML a target for legislation that could force ever-closer integration with Washington, without whose components, software and market access ASML itself would find itself in serious difficulty.
Image | ASML
More information | Tom’s Hardware
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