The bill that closes the last loophole
The Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act, introduced in the US House as H.R. 8170 on April 2, 2026 by Reps. Michael Baumgartner and Maggie Goodlander, targets what its sponsors call the last gap in the chip-equipment blockade: deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion lithography. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) tools have been barred from China since 2019. The MATCH Act would extend that ban to DUV immersion systems — the workhorse machines ASML still sells into China — and, more consequentially, prohibit servicing, spare parts, and technical support for machines already installed at five named Chinese manufacturers: SMIC, YMTC, CXMT, Hua Hong, and Huawei (Baumgartner press release).
Critically, the bill doesn't just regulate American firms — DUV lithography is a Dutch export, made almost exclusively by ASML in Veldhoven. So the bill gives the Netherlands and Japan a 150-day window to adopt "equivalent" controls voluntarily. If they don't, the Commerce Department gets authority to expand the Foreign Direct Product Rule unilaterally, reaching Dutch-made machines because they contain American-origin components and software. The press release notes chipmaking equipment is the Netherlands' single largest export category to China — which is precisely why this is being treated in The Hague as a threat to core national economic interests, not a routine compliance update.
Not a new fight — but a sharper one
The Netherlands has already moved twice on its own initiative. In 2023, it introduced a licensing requirement for advanced DUV immersion systems; in September 2024 it extended licensing to the older 1970i and 1980i models. Both were unilateral Dutch decisions, made after consultation with Washington but under Dutch law, administered by Dutch customs. That history matters, because it undercuts the premise that the Netherlands has been dragging its feet — it has tightened controls twice in three years, faster than most European counterparts on any comparable dual-use category.
Steelmanning the case for going further
The strongest argument for MATCH is that licensing regimes leak. DUV tools sold years ago don't stop working when a new export rule takes effect — they keep running, and their productive life is extended indefinitely by servicing, recalibration, and software updates. If the national-security concern is China's capacity to manufacture chips for military and AI applications at scale, a ban on new sales alone does little if the installed base can be serviced forever. ASML's own numbers illustrate the stakes: installed-base servicing revenue grew 26% in 2025, evidence the maintenance relationship — not just new-unit sales — is now a durable channel of technical support to Chinese fabs (The Motley Fool). A servicing ban targets exactly that leak.
There's also a coordination-failure argument for the multilateral framing: if only the US restricts equipment while Dutch and Japanese suppliers keep servicing machines, Chinese fabs simply route around American components, and the control regime achieves nothing except handing market share to non-US suppliers. Forcing allied alignment, rather than tolerating a patchwork, is a coherent policy goal on its face.
Where the proportionality argument breaks down
But coercion is a poor substitute for coordination, and the mechanism here is coercion. The 150-day clock, backed by a threat to expand extraterritorial jurisdiction over a sovereign ally's licensing decisions, treats a partner that has independently tightened its own rules twice in three years as a laggard to be threatened rather than a partner to be negotiated with. That reportedly hasn't gone unnoticed in The Hague, where officials have been lobbying Washington against the bill even as its prospects for passage — reportedly attached to the defense authorization process — look strong (TrendForce).
The servicing ban is the sharper problem. Retroactively cutting off maintenance on machines that were lawfully sold under a licensing regime the exporting government itself approved is closer to an uncompensated taking than an export control — it penalizes past lawful conduct rather than restricting future transactions, with no finding that any specific machine's continued operation newly threatens proliferation. And the economic exposure is real and immediate: China accounted for roughly a third of ASML's 2025 revenue, a share the company had already guided down for other reasons before this bill existed (The Motley Fool).
There is also a strategic irony sponsors haven't fully reckoned with: the tighter the servicing noose, the stronger the incentive for China to finish its own domestic DUV substitute. State-backed efforts are already targeting initial deliveries to SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT this year. A near-total servicing ban may simply accelerate the industrial-policy outcome — indigenous Chinese lithography capacity — that export controls were designed to delay.
The proportionate alternative
A better approach keeps the goal — closing the installed-base servicing gap for the handful of fabs doing genuinely sensitive work — without the ultimatum. That means facility-specific, end-use-based license reviews negotiated jointly with Dutch and Japanese regulators, not a unilateral deadline enforced by threatening a partner's largest export sector. The Netherlands has shown it will tighten controls when the security case is made. Washington should make that case, not impose a clock.