Chinese students in Netherlands stuck in tech war crossfire

The Netherlands will lose top semiconductor industry talent if the country maintains probing national security checks on Chinese students enrolled at its universities, Chinese state-run media reports and nationalistic commentators have asserted in the latest tech war tit-for-tat.

The Chinese comments came after Robert-Jan Smits, president of the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology, told Bloomberg earlier this month that the United States ambassador to the Netherlands had questioned him about why so many of his university’s students hail from China.

Smits said some restrictions have already been imposed as the university is extremely careful about allowing student access to the country’s top-notch sensitive technology. Eindhoven University is situated about eight kilometers from the global headquarters of ASML, the world’s biggest supplier of advanced chip-making equipment.

Bloomberg said more than a quarter of the Eindhoven University’s students are international. A further breakdown of that figure is not publicly available.

In May, ASML said it will expand its collaboration with Eindhoven University over the next decade through an 80 million euro (US$87 million) investment to support its research and training in areas including plasma physics, mechatronics, optics and artificial intelligence.

The university plans to invest over 100 million euros to set up a cleanroom, or dust-free environment, for the research of chip manufacturing processes and to finance its PhD student program over the next 10 years.

EUV lithography

The Netherlands is firmly in the middle of the US-China tech war. In 2019, the US asked the Dutch government to stop permitting the export of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV)