Bloomberg · China · TSMC · Nvidia · TechCrunch AI
The Commerce Department didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 source. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
◌ Single Source
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has, in a series of recent meetings, told senior ASML executives he’s 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.
Key facts
- He argued the only reason ASML could build an EUV machine at all was that 80% of it already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and that solving the one genuinely new problem, generating EUV
- ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales to China
- That monopoly has made ASML Europe’s most valuable public company, with a market capitalization that has been trading in the neighborhood of $700 billion as of this week, up sharply over the past
- The reporter sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question
Summary
U.S. It’s a serious claim. You might think this isn’t worth paying attention to if you’re outside the chip industry, but it is. Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia’s and Apple’s chips, depends on ASML tools that took the company roughly two decades and untold billions to develop. The reporter sat down with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet six weeks ago, well before this story broke, and asked him directly about the China question.