ASML Photo: VCG

Chinese mainland remained ASML's biggest market in the fourth quarter of 2025, accounting for 36% of the company's net system sales, ASML's Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen said in a call with reporters, reported Bloomberg on Wednesday, while the Chinese market is expected to fall to about 20 percent of revenue going forward.

According to the report, the result was reached amid restrictions banning certain products from being sold to the Chinese mainland. Chinese market remains open to mutually beneficial, win-win trade, reflecting the nation's long-standing commitment to cooperation, while export curbs have also prompted greater self-reliance and strengthened domestic capabilities in chip manufacturing, reinforcing the country's ability to uphold that commitment and pursue cooperation on a more equal and balanced footing, Chinese experts said.

While the company has never been able to sell its EUV lithography machines to China due to US-led restrictions aimed at curbing the Asian nation's progress in the semiconductor sector, according to Bloomberg.  It's also restricted from selling its most advanced deep ultraviolet, or DUV, tools to the country, and the machines it ships to China are eight generations behind most sophisticated model, the report said.

Advanced lithography machines are seen by some as the "last bastion" of Western technological leadership. 

In September 2024, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published in the Guiding Catalogue on Promoting the Use of First Set of Important Technical Equipment (2024 Version) the technical specifications of domestically made DUV lithography machines - lithography machines with 65 nm resolution and 8 nm overlay accuracy. The future technological roadmap for domestically made lithography machines is clear: China will continue to advance toward independent and controllable development.

The logic is the same for China and other countries: The stronger a nation's domestic research and development capabilities, the greater its leverage in international cooperation and the better positioned it is to advance cooperation while withstanding external interference, Chen Jing, a vice-president of the Technology and Strategy Research Institute, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

China has never pursued indigenous innovations at the expense of international cooperation, Chen said, noting that many of the country's most widely recognized technological breakthroughs emerged amid Western sanctions and export bans. In areas where cooperation has remained relatively normal, Chinese firms have maintained close ties with Western technology companies, a pattern he described as consistent with the logic of globalized technology development and commercial operations.

Although the company's market share in China in the fourth quarter was slightly lower than the 42 percent recorded in the third quarter, it remained higher than the levels seen in the first two quarters of last year, according to Bloomberg.
 
International cooperation remains crucial to China's chip industry, Chen added. He said Chinese authorities and companies, together with international semiconductor players, are expanding cooperation while seeking to minimize political interference. Under sustained pressure, Chinese firms have continued to deliver R&D breakthroughs, supported by broad market demand, while international companies are still willing to deepen their presence in China, according to Chen.

At its core, Chen said, the dynamic is driven by the sheer attractiveness of the Chinese market. "If application and systems development in China were constrained and demand weakened, international companies would find little commercial incentive to stay," he said.

China's AI chip market is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion) by 2028, accounting for about 30 percent of the global market, driven by strong domestic demand, Science and Technology Daily reported on Sunday.

Notably, data showed that shipments or orders of domestically developed chips have reached the scale of tens of thousands of units, indicating growing market recognition of the performance, stability and total cost of ownership of homegrown AI chips, Chinese experts said.

Driven by tightened chip export controls, China's push toward self-sufficiency in domestically developed data-center AI chips is accelerating, domestic financial magazine Caijing reported.

Caijing's report said at least nine Chinese AI chipmakers have recorded shipments or orders exceeding 10,000 units, including Huawei's Ascend series. Among them, leading AI chip companies with larger-scale deliveries have accumulated shipments at the level of 100,000 units.

By contrast, smaller AI chipmakers such as Sunrise, which develops its own AI computing chips, reported shipments or orders of more than 10,000 units in 2025, the report said. Prices of domestically produced AI inference chips currently range from about 30,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan per chip.