The CEO trapped in the U.S.-China chip battle

livemint.com:

In a series of articles this week, Wall Street Journal reporters from around the world go inside the escalating global chip battle. At stake: leadership of an industry expected to double in size by the end of the decade to $1 trillion. Christophe Fouquet recently took the reins of a little-known company that makes some of the world’s most sophisticated machines.

It is also smack in the middle of the chip battle between the U.S. and China. His job involves maintaining an increasingly precarious balance: honoring demands from the West not to sell ASML Holding’s most sophisticated chip-making equipment to China, while keeping the Chinese market open for less-advanced machinery—one of its biggest businesses.

Chief Executive Fouquet, a 51-year-old Frenchman, is said to be technically sophisticated, wary of politics and eager to keep a low profile. That is also a pretty good description of how ASML long operated as a company—only now it doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring geopolitics. For many years the company didn’t need to worry about political restrictions on where its machines could be sold, “and then suddenly that became one of the most important topics on the entire planet," Fouquet said in an interview.

Netherlands-based ASML produces highly complex machines that use light to print tiny designs onto silicon, giving the company a key role in the production of microchips found in everything from smartphones to cars, medical devices and satellites. It holds a monopoly over some of the world’s most advanced chip-making machines, which are crucial in the production of the most advanced chips used to power artificial-intelligence systems. That expertise has led to U.S.