The US says ASML’s top chip tool may be in China. ASML says it isn’t

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has told senior ASML executives he is concerned that one of the Dutch company's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines may have been shipped to China, a potential breach of export controls that have barred such sales since the first Trump administration, Bloomberg reported [1]. Senior administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China, though they have declined to show that evidence to the news organization or to ASML [1]. The Commerce Department did not respond to questions about whether it has evidence of an actual EUV system on Chinese soil [1]. ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said the company tracks every machine it has ever shipped and that no EUV tool has ever been in China [1]. "You can't reverse-engineer a machine you've never had, and nobody in China has had one," Fouquet said [1]. ASML is the only company in the world that produces and sells EUV systems for chip production, a technology that uses 13.5 nm light from a laser-pulsed tin plasma to create patterns on semiconductor substrates [5]. The company's monopoly on the most advanced lithography tools has made it Europe's most valuable public company, with a market capitalization around $700 billion [1]. Every cutting-edge processor made by TSMC, the foundry behind Nvidia's and Apple's chips, depends on ASML's EUV tools [1]. Fouquet told TechCrunch that ASML built an internal firewall years ago, walling off employees who can access EUV technology from those who cannot, and that China-based staff sit on the restricted side by design [1]. He said 80% of the EUV technology already existed from decades of prior knowledge, and solving the one genuinely new problem — generating EUV light — took 20 years on its own [1]. ASML expects roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue to come from already-permitted sales of older deep ultraviolet tools to China [1]. The Commerce Department, under Lutnick's leadership, agreed late last year to put up to $150 million of taxpayer money into xLight, a startup developing next-generation light-source technology [1]. Separately, Peter Thiel — the German-American venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund — has backed Substrate, a startup pursuing its own EUV-rival technology [1][2]. Thiel's Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in SpaceX and Palantir, and an early investor in Facebook [4]. A bipartisan bill moving through Congress would go further than the current EUV restrictions, calling for an effective ban on all of ASML's deep ultraviolet shipments to China [1]. The bill cleared a key committee in April, and the Trump administration has not taken a formal position on it [1]. ASML's EUV systems rely on optics from Carl Zeiss SMT, in which ASML holds a 24.9% minority stake [7]. China's own lithography efforts include Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, a state-backed company developing domestic scanners, though Reuters reported in December 2025 that China had developed its own prototype EUV system [5][6].