Alan Estavez, US undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, will meet with officials and ASML executives in the Netherlands on Monday and raise the servicing contract matter with them, according to a Reuters report.
The report also says the Biden administration may ask ASML to stop selling equipment to a new list of Chinese chip-making factories.
Since last year Washington has been pushing the Dutch government to restrict the maintenance services that are provided by ASML to Chinese customers.
Recent public statements made by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s administration suggest that the Netherlands will be slow to approve Chinese maintenance requests in the future and quick to deny them, Reuters reported. ⠀
From January 1 this year, the Dutch government stopped granting licenses for the shipment to China of ASML’s most advanced DUV immersion lithography systems (NXT: 2000i, NXT:2050i and NXT:2100i and subsequent systems).
Caijing.com reported last November that there were fewer than five ASML systems in China as advanced as NXT:2000i. The report said the total number of units of the NXT:1980Di, which is not subject to the US export ban, should be below 80 in China. ⠀
The Chinese Embassy in Washington complained that the US is overstretching the concept of national security and using pretexts to coerce other countries into joining its technological blockade against China. ⠀
In a two-hour phone call on April 2, Chinese President Xi Jinping told US President Joe Biden that China is “not going to sit back and watch” if the US continues to suppress China’s trade and technology development and add more and more Chinese entities to its sanctions lists.
If the US wants control over china’s chip fabs they should keep it the way it is right now. ASML already does not sell its latest machines to china because of US orders. If china will not be able to maintain the last-gen ASML models anymore, then they will definitely put even more money into researching their own. And when they have their own machines then the US doesn’t have any control anymore.
The thing is china is great at reverse engineering things, but not great at manufacturing things to the spec needed at this precision. There’s literally one company on earth that supplies optics manufactured at this level of precision (Zeiss), who have spent decades to get where they are. Even if China has the design technology, they would still be far behind in the manufacturing if they’re trying to make their own optics.