Ex-ASML employee gave secrets to Huawei, reports Dutch newspaper

A Dutch newspaper – NRC claims that an Ex-ASML employee stole trade secrets from the lithography equipment maker and gave them to Huawei.

It is said that a former ASML employee started working at Huawei in 2022 along with ASML trade data. ASML confirmed this as “unauthorized embezzlement” in its 2022 annual report.

In early 2023, ASML CEO, Peter Wennink said that information theft was a small part of the technology. Interestingly, the ASML CEO (at that time) didn’t point out Huawei in his statement. Also, the identity of the Ex-ASML employee is kept secret in this entire trade secrets theft report on Huawei.

For now, there’s no statement published by Huawei or ASML on this matter.

The new information comes amid the US is looking to tighten export control on more supply chains in China to prevent its technological breakthroughs including semiconductors.

For years, Huawei has been the center of US-China trade disputes. In 2019, the US Commerce Department added Huawei to the Entity List. This prohibits the US suppliers from selling products such as chipsets to Huawei. However, at that time, U.S. commerce allowed some suppliers with special licenses to sell products to Chinese companies.

Later on, the impact of the Entity List began to fade away with alternative global supply chains. Therefore, the US expanded the effect of this restriction program to overseas markets and all of the companies that are using US-originated technologies.

ASML is also restricted by the US to ship lithography machines to China. Recently, the US announced a new ban on advanced AI chip technology export and ASML expressed that this would have a massive impact on its customers.

Why lithography is important?

A lithography system is essentially a projection system. Microchips are made by building up complex patterns of transistors, layer by layer, on a silicon wafer and lithography systems are central to that process.

(source)