Pax Silica

Pax Silica is the US-led alliance coordinating AI-chip supply chains and export controls among allies, a direct counter to China's bid to close the gap in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Launched in Washington in December 2025 under US State Department stewardship, its founding members were the UK, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia. By June 2026 membership had grown to more than fifteen states after the EU and ten additional countries joined across the same month.

When the EU joined on 3 June 2026 via COREPER authorisation committing the bloc to at least $40bn (€37bn) in US AI chips, France objected on sovereignty grounds while Germany, Italy and the Netherlands backed the move as preferable to tariff exposure; Council validation followed on 8 June. Ten more countries then joined in June, including the Netherlands (home to ASML) and Germany (host of the TSMC-led ESMC Dresden fab), along with Greece, several Latin American states and Estonia as an observer. Members at the Washington summit flagged US case-by-case sign-off on GPT-5.6 access as a 'kill switch' on the very models the EU's AI Gigafactories are built to run. EuroHPC's guidance for the July €4.12bn AI Gigafactories funding call contains a 'Cooperation Agreement' carve-out: Pax Silica membership qualifies a builder to bypass the EU-ownership requirement, drawing the alliance's export-control framework inside EU-funded compute infrastructure without requiring any rule change.

Pax Silica's premise, that allied export controls on China are set collectively rather than imposed unilaterally by Washington, was tested from within the alliance on 24 June 2026 when the US Congress's MATCH Act sought to bring Dutch DUV export licensing for ASML under American approval. The Dutch Cabinet Left Washington consultations describing itself as "irritated"; the Netherlands, a Pax Silica member since June, argued the bill would let the US direct the commercial decisions of an allied government's own export-control regime rather than coordinate them.