The US ambassador to the Netherlands, Shefali Razdan Duggal, reportedly questioned the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU Eindhoven) about the “large number” of Chinese students studying at the institution.
The comments were made by university president Robert-Jan Smits in a recent interview, first reported by Bloomberg.
Eindhoven University of Technology is located approximately eight kilometers from ASML’s global headquarters in the Eindhoven suburb of Veldhoven, Netherlands.
In May 2024, the company signed an agreement with the university to invest €80 million ($87 million) over a ten-year period. The money will be used to establish a cleanroom at TU Eindhoven and fund PhD studies and research in semiconductors, plasma physics, mechatronics, optics, and AI.
TU Eindhoven also has ASML lithography machines housed in a university lab for research purposes.
ASML is the sole global supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) photolithography machines that are needed to make the most advanced chips.
The company has been at the center of the US government’s ongoing trade war with China, with the Dutch government increasingly succumbing to pressure from the Biden administration to block exports of ASML products to China.
First, it banned ASML from selling its most advanced equipment to China, and then in January 2024, it revoked an export license to stop the shipment of two older lithography machines to Chinese customers. In late March, the US government announced it would start asking its allies to stop their domestic semiconductor companies from servicing chipmaking tools for Chinese customers.
"We get the message to be careful with Chinese students but who is giving all kinds of visas to Chinese students to go to American universities? The US government,” Smits said.
Over a quarter of the university’s students are international, although Bloomberg reported that TU Eindhoven wasn’t able to immediately confirm what percentage were Chinese nationals.
Earlier this month, ASML’s former CEO Peter Wennink said that the ongoing semiconductor trade war between the US and China is ideologically driven rather than based on facts.
"I think in Washington, maybe they sometimes thought, that Mr. Wennink, maybe he's a friend of China," he said in an interview with Dutch radio station BNR. "No. I'm a friend to my customers, to my suppliers, to my employees, to my shareholders."
In 2023, the Dutch government drafted legislation that would stop Chinese students from being able to enroll in university programs that focus on sensitive technologies such as semiconductors. However, the bill has not yet been voted on and a change of government earlier this month has left its legislative future uncertain.
