According to reports, the Biden administration has achieved an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to limit China’s access to sophisticated chipmaking gear. According to Bloomberg, officials from the two nations agreed on Friday to use some of the same export limitations that the United States has employed in the previous year to block businesses such as NVIDIA from selling their newest technology in China. According to the agreement, export limits would be enforced on lithography system manufacturers such as ASML and Nikon.
According to Bloomberg, the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan do not intend to make the deal public. Furthermore, an implementation might take “months” while the nations sort out the legal kinks. “Talks have been going on for a long time, but we don’t talk about it. And if anything comes out of this, it is dubious if it will be made extremely prominent,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte remarked on Friday in response to a query about the talks.
The arrangement, according to Bloomberg, will cover “at least” part of ASML’s immersion lithography equipment. As of last year, ASML was the only manufacturer of the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) tools required by chipmakers to create the 5nm and 3nm semiconductors that power today’s smartphones and computers. Cutting China off from ASML’s goods is part of the Biden administration’s strategy to halt the country’s homegrown chip sector. Chinese state media announced this summer that SMIC, China’s top semiconductor producer, had commenced volume production of 14nm chips and had successfully begun producing 7nm silicon without access to foreign chip-making equipment. SMIC is working on 5nm semiconductors, according to China, although it’s unclear how the business would do it without access to EUV equipment.
