AN American official Tuesday made the most direct comments by a U.S. authority to date acknowledging the existence of a deal with Japan and the Netherlands for those countries to impose new curbs on exports of chipmaking tools to China.

“We can’t talk about the deal right now,” U.S. Deputy Commerce Department Secretary Don Graves said on the sidelines of an event in Washington. “But you can certainly talk to our friends in Japan and the Netherlands.”

Bloomberg reported Friday an agreement had been finalized and two people familiar with the matter later confirmed the news to Reuters.

The United States in October imposed sweeping export restrictions on shipments of chipmaking tools to China, seeking to hobble the Asian country’s ability to supercharge its chip industry.

These restrictions included an export ban on advanced computing chips and devices containing them, and certain semiconductor manufacturing items including extreme ultraviolet lithograph machines.

Then in mid-December, the Biden administration expanded those restrictions to prevent an additional 36 Chinese institutions and chipmakers from accessing U.S. chip technology, including Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp., the largest contract chipmaker in the world.

The ban on exports included restrictions on semiconductors used in artificial intelligence hardware, such as graphical processing units, tensor processing units and other advanced application-specific integrated circuits.

For the restrictions to be effective, though, the United States needed to bring on board the Netherlands and Japan, home to chipmaking powerhouses ASML, Nikon Corp. and Tokyo Electron Ltd.

The U.S. Commerce Department yesterday said in an email it will continue to coordinate on export controls with allies.

“We recognize that multilateral controls are more effective than unilateral controls, and foreign engagement on these controls is a ... priority,” the agency said.

Officials from the Netherlands and Japan were in Washington discussing a wide range of issues in talks led by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Friday.

When asked Friday if an agreement on semiconductors had been discussed, U.S. President Joe Biden said: “Yes, we talked about a lot of things, but a lot of it is private.”

According to the deal, the Netherlands will prevent ASML from selling to China at least some immersion lithography machines, the most advanced kind of gear in the company’s deep ultraviolet lithography line. The equipment is crucial to making cutting-edge chips. Japan will set similar limits on Nikon and Tokyo Electron.

Because of its dominance in the chipmaking gear market, ASML has been cited by experts as a bellwether of the growing rift between China and the United States over access to advanced technology.

In recent months, the Dutch government has faced pressure from the United States to limit chip-related exports to China, particularly from ASML.

But ASML’s chief executive, Peter Wennink, has warned that the U.S. campaign could have unintended consequences, predicting that China will develop the technology itself instead of importing it.

“That will take time, but ultimately they will get there,” he said Jan. 25. (SD-Agencies)