When the United States announced unprecedented export restrictions to hit China's chip industry last October, it went it alone.

Joe Biden's chief export controller at the Department of Commerce, Alan Estevez, said at the time that it was adapting to the evolving threat from Beijing - and continued efforts "to outreach and coordinate with allies and partners".

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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Sofia Dreisbach

North American political correspondent based in Washington.

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Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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Patrick Welter

Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.

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What Estevez didn't say at the time, Washington had been negotiating behind the scenes for months with the Netherlands and Japan to bring two of the most important locations for chip machine manufacturers on board.

But the talks were extremely tough.

Almost four months later, the three countries now seem to have reached an agreement.

The USA, the Netherlands and Japan have not yet announced much about the deal which, according to media reports, they made last Friday in Washington.

But one thing seems clear: China will be cut off from one of the most important high-tech products from Western production, machines for manufacturing the most powerful computer chips in the world.

They are built in the Netherlands by market leader ASML and its Japanese competitors Nikon and Canon.

ASML said, "To our understanding, steps have been taken towards an intergovernmental agreement related to advanced chip manufacturing technology." Nikon and Tokyo Electron initially did not comment.

This is considered an indication that details of the government agreements are still open.

Politically, the agreement is a milestone.

Washington had already begun during the Trump administration in 2018 to put pressure on the Netherlands to sell chip manufacturing technologies - apparently successfully.

Shortly after a visit by Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the White House, the Dutch government decided not to renew the export license to China for so-called EUV machines, on which ASML has a monopoly.

Using extreme ultraviolet light, these machines can burn billions of transistors onto microchips, the distance between the lines being only three to seven millionths of a meter.

Fragile Supply Chains

A year ago, Washington wanted to extend the ban from the most modern to the predecessor model, the so-called DUV machines.

The Biden administration justified this with a threat to national security - with possible military applications, from drones to ICBMs.

However, such semiconductors are also used in cars, computers and mobile phones and are already in short supply, which is reflected, for example, in longer delivery times for cars.

A blanket export ban to China would also have severely restricted the business of the Dutch group ASML, each individual machine costs 160 million euros.

Prime Minister Rutte therefore formulated three conditions for the negotiations.

"We agree with everyone who says that Western high technology in semiconductors should not be used everywhere in the world," he said last week in an interview with the FAZ and several other international media.

"Secondly, we must maintain the technological leadership of the West, Europe, America and Asia." Thirdly, however, one must "think of the supply chains, because many chips are used in refrigerators, cars, televisions that are not high-tech".

There was a struggle for this third point.