Dutch semiconductor equipment firm ASML on Wednesday missed on net bookings expectations, suggesting a potential slowdown in demand for its critical chipmaking machines.

ASML reported net bookings of 3.94 billion euros ($4.47 billion) for the first three months of 2025, versus a Reuters reported forecast of 4.89 billion euros.

Here’s how ASML did versus LSEG consensus estimates for the first quarter:

• Net sales: 7.74 billion, against 7.8 billion euros expected
• Net profit: 2.36 billion, versus 2.3 billion euros expected

In comments accompanying the results, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said that the demand outlook “remains strong” with artificial intelligence staying as a key driver. However, he added that “uncertainty with some of our customers” could take the company into the lower end of its full-year revenue guidance.

ASML is estimating 2025 revenue of between of 30 billion euros to 35 billion euros.

Fouquet said that tariffs are “creating a new uncertainty” both on a macroeconomic level and with respect to “our potential market demands.”

“So this is a dynamic I think we have to watch very carefully,” Fouquet said. “Now this being said, where we are today, we still see basically our revenue range for 2025 being between basically €30 and €35 billion.”

Global chip stocks have been fragile over the last two weeks amid worries about how U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff plans will affect the semiconductor supply chain.

Last week, the U.S. administration announced smartphones, computers and semiconductors would be temporarily exempted from his so-called “reciprocal” duties on counterparties. But on Sunday, Trump and his top trade officials created confusion with comments that there would be no tariff “exception” for the electronics industry, and that these goods were instead moving to a different “bucket.”

On Tuesday, a federal government notice announced that the U.S. Commerce Department was conducting a national security investigation into imports of semiconductor technology and related downstream products. The probe will examine whether additional trade measures, including tariffs, are “necessary to protect national security.”

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) on Tuesday issued a cease and desist order against Google for unfair trade practices regarding search services on Android devices— a move that aligns with similar crackdowns on firms in the UK and the U.S. 

In a statement, the Commission said the American tech giant violated Japan’s anti-monopoly law by requiring Android device manufacturers to prioritize its own search apps and services through licensing agreements. 

While Google develops the Android operating system, separate manufacturing companies like Samsung and Lenovo produce handheld Android products, such as smartphones and tablets. Thus, licensing agreements are necessary to grant these manufacturers permission to preinstall Google apps, including its Play Store, onto devices.

However, JFTC said Google also used licenses to require manufacturers to preinstall and prominently feature Google Search and Chrome on devices, with at least six such agreements in effect with Android makers as of December 2024. 

The Commission added that the company required manufacturers to exclude rival search services as a condition of its advertising revenue-sharing model. 

Under Japan’s anti-monopoly law, businesses are prohibited from carrying out trade on restrictive terms that unjustly impede transaction partners’ business activities. 

JFTC first published the commencement of its probe into Google on October 23, 2023, and in April 2024, it approved a commitment plan from Google that addressed some of its anti-competitive concerns. 

The cease and desist order demonstrates a harder stance taken by the Japanese government as well as its first such action against a U.S. tech giant. 

The move also comes amid a trend of anti-competitive actions against Google globally. According to JFTC, it coordinated its probe with other overseas competition watchdogs that had experience investigating Google.

In a landmark case last year, a federal U.S. judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in the search market, saying that its exclusive search arrangements on Android and Apple’s iPhone had helped to cement its dominance in the space.

Meanwhile, Britain’s competition watchdog opened an investigation into Google’s search services in January following the country’s implementation of new competition rules.

JFTC’s cease and desist orders that Google stop mandating that its own services be installed and featured prominently on smartphones. 

Additionally, the company should relax its restrictive conditions for the distribution of advertising revenue, allowing manufacturers to choose from a variety of options.

Google has also been asked to appoint an independent third party that will report to the JFTC on its compliance with the cease and desist order over the next five years.

Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.

On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.

The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.

During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.

China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.

Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.

DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.

In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.

Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.

At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs. 

Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”

Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.

WATCH: Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China