>it is common knowledge that chip technology for purely military applications is usually 10, 15 years old

Is it? I thought that nowadays the consumer market often surpasses military stuff, where CPU is not the limiting factor and specialized chips are more an exercise in obfuscation in case shot down or customized for factors like extreme heat and it’s more areas like materials science where the military surpasses industry. (Heat/radar resistant tile … that sort of stuff.)

This guy is getting greedy.

Anyone who runs a semiconductor equipment company would know that one major reason that ASML is critically important to the US government is its EUV technology. This is the barrier between the Taiwan-dependent status quo and an independent China semiconductor supply chain.

If ASML sells EUV machines to China, Taiwan loses a major source of importance to the Chinese economy. This would shift the entire Mexican standoff between China, Taiwan, the US, Europe, South Korea, and Japan.

The ASML CEO is playing dumb and pretending the issue is a simple question of percentage sales to China.

Forgive my ignorance but what is an EUV machine?

EUV is extreme ultraviolet lithography, and it operates at a far smaller wavelength (approximately 13.5nm) than earlier deep ultraviolet lithography techniques. These are very large machines that use a complex assortment of lasers and mirrors to basically print chip designs onto silicon. As chip features get smaller, they can operate with less power and they generate less heat. This is important for the chips used in portable devices like cell phones and laptops. There is only one producer of EUV lithography machines in the world: ASML. EUV is a key technology for printing small chip features because the bigger wavelengths have trouble printing extremely small chip designs.

Thanks! Now I understand better.