The proposed $10 billion deal was announced in September 2013, but it had nearly been impossible to come up with a deal which the US antitrust authorities would approve.

Part of the problem was that it would have combined two of the three largest players in a sector crucial to the production of chips.

Chip foundries are becoming expensive to build, even as prices for chips are falling. Pressure on suppliers of chip-making machinery is intense.

By joining forces, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron hoped to streamline research and development operations and benefit from greater manufacturing scale.

They had also planned to save tens of millions of dollars in taxes by incorporating the new company in the Netherlands.

It was the second big technology merger deal to collapse in a week over antitrust concerns. Comcast abandoned its planned $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable in the face of skepticism from the Department and the Federal Communications Commission.

If Applied Materials, the larger of the two chip-equipment companies, had been allowed to take over Tokyo Electron, it would have been the biggest acquisition of a Japanese corporation by an American company outside the financial industry.