In December 2023, ASML and Samsung announced a joint investment of 1 trillion won (approximately $760 million) to build a research and development facility in South Korea.

ASML is recognized globally as a leader in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a critical process for manufacturing the smallest and most powerful chips.

A sales clerk shows off Elpida Memory Inc. memory chips at an electronics shop in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, March 5, 2009.Tomohiro Ohsumi | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesShares in Japan's chip-related companies extended declines for a second day as Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI competitiveness calls into question the United States' leadership in the field.Semiconductor testing equipment supplier Advantest slid over 10%, Tokyo Electron fell 3.6%, while Renesas Electronics traded 2.29% lower Tuesday.Softbank Group, which owns chip designer Arm, slid 5.26%. Data center-related shares also continued to take a hit, with wire and cable firms Furukawa and Fujikura dropping 8.22% and 8.1%, respectively.DeepSeek released a free, open-source large language model in late December, claiming it was created in only two months with a budget of under $6 million. Last week, the lab introduced R1, a reasoning model that outperformed OpenAI's latest o1 in several third-party tests."There will be a lot more pain to follow today as we follow the U.S. down," said Andrew Jackson, head of equity strategy at ORTUS Advisors. "The big questions is whether the U.S. will U-turn on their approach and deregulate chip and SPE restrictions seeing as they are (currently) ineffectual or try and ramp things up even more," Jackson wrote in an email