Despite disagreements over trade policies with China, the U.S. and the Netherlands have signed the European nation to the Pax Silica initiative of countries looking to reduce reliance on China for key raw materials and manufacturing expertise in the AI industry, as reported by Reuters. With the Netherlands playing host to the key supply chain company, ASML, Europe's largest tech company, and the most advanced manufacturing of cutting-edge photolithography machines for semiconductor fabrication, this is a big strategic win for the U.S.-led initiative.
Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma travelled to Washington this week to sign the deal, meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and fellow lawmakers as part of ongoing negotiations around trade in high-tech chips and hardware, particularly with China.
Speaking with reporters, he said that the U.S. and the Netherlands have shared goals in preventing sensitive technology from ending up in dangerous hands - the Netherlands famously seized key Dutch chip manufacturer Nexperia from its Chinese parent company, Wingtech, in 2025. However, he also raised concerns over American legislation that would make it difficult for companies like ASML to even service machines and tools already delivered to countries like China.
That could affect the Netherlands' national security and market position of key Dutch companies, he said.
Pax Silica - Speremus ut diu duret
The Pax Silica, or "Silicon Peace" initiative, was set up in December 2025 by the U.S. Department of State as a direct plan to reduce reliance on China and to build more robust, Western-aligned supply chains for key elements in the semiconductor, AI, and rare-earth element industries. At its outset, Pax Silica secured non-binding signatures from seven countries, including Australia, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were joined in the months that followed by Greece, Qatar, the UAE, India, Sweden, Finland, the Philippines, and Norway.
Canada and Taiwan have both been invited to join and are said to be participating in summit sessions, but haven't officially signed just yet. The Netherlands did effectively join in December 2025, but was described as a "non-signing partner" in the initiative.
There are ongoing disputes between the U.S. and the Netherlands over whether ASML should be allowed to service and sell less advanced chip fabrication machines to China, while still restricting access to the latest tools.
Those discussions are reportedly still ongoing and were brought up in the meeting between Lutnick and Sjoerdsma this week. The Dutch official has been quite frank in his public statements on the Match Act bipartisan bill that would place restrictions on companies supplying to China.
“The Netherlands’ starting point is that every country is responsible for its own laws,” Sjoerdsma said in May, via Reuters.
Under the silicon thumb
A key story in the global race to adopt and supply AI through infrastructure building and rapid development has been access to the raw materials, tools, machines, and expertise required to create it. That's mainly had the United States and China at loggerheads with one another, with the former restricting access to cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs and other semiconductor products, and China rowing back access to its manufacturing and raw material industries.
But while that's acted as a tit-for-tat backdrop to U.S. and Chinese trade relations and particularly the mercurial needs and demands of President Trump, the divestment of global supply chains from traditional Chinese sources has spread globally. Nexperia was one key Dutch entity that was brought back in-house from Chinese owners, and in June 2025, Taiwanese firm Pegatron announced new production facilities in Mexico and the U.S. to move away from reliance on China.
The U.S. has also been trying to restrict China's access to high-tech hardware for a number of years. President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2019, which effectively banned Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE from being used in any U.S. government agencies. Both companies were later designated as threats to national security in 2020. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. implemented a new series of export controls in 2022 to constrain China's ability to accelerate its high-technology and chip manufacturing industries.
This led to a boom in domestic Chinese chip production, as well as a rapidly expanding black market smuggling industry that ultimately saw officials in U.S. firms jailed, and even Nvidia potentially implicated.
But in 2026, even as the U.S. has approved the sale of some high-end Nvidia chips to China, its new Pax Silica Initiative and MATCH Act are putting more pressure on China than ever before, and global partners aren't entirely happy about it.
Under the bill, foreign-owned companies like ASML that don't comply with the restrictions on business dealings with China could find themselves losing access to U.S. components, software, or customers. Although the world still needs ASML - it's one of the tightest bottlenecks in the global chip supply chain - becoming part of the Pax Silica initiative could prove paramount for advanced economies wanting to make the most of advances in AI and chip fabrication.
Although Dutch officials still clearly have reservations about the MATCH Act, it's not clear how much leverage they can have over it, or whether it's possible to ignore its claimed mandates.
Unsteady ground
The Netherlands and other strategically aligned economies with a foothold in the AI supply chain face a tricky situation in 2026. Initiatives like Pax Silica raise the prospect of greater autonomy in the global supply chain, with less reliance on China for key materials, tools, and manufacturing expertise. But that may simply replace one dependency with another, trading exposure to Beijing for greater oversight from Washington, and even coercion if certain controls aren’t adhered to.
For the Dutch, ASML isn’t just a key company. It is one of the world’s most important technology pillars and helps the Netherlands punch well above its weight in global supply-chain politics. Without ASML, manufacturers like Samsung, Micron, and TSMC, and component designers like Nvidia, would not be able to build the cutting-edge hardware they can today. That gives the Netherlands real muscle when pursuing its own interests.
But it also makes ASML a target for legislation that could limit Dutch autonomy and force tighter integration with larger players like the United States, without whose components, software, and market access ASML would struggle.
That tension is unlikely to disappear. Even if the U.S. midterms later this year help leash some of the more turbulent aspects of the Trump administration, they won’t end American ambitions to pull control of the global chip and AI supply chains away from China, and tuck it into Washington’s own catalogue of control.
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