As the world's lone provider of EUV lithography systems, ASML is Europe's largest business by market capitalization, currently appreciated at about $660 billion. But it earned nearly nothing in Europe this year, downward from 1% of total profits in 2025 and 5% in 2024. Why? European chipmakers bought no lithography equipment from ASML in 2026 — and the business is calling on EU authorities to assistance create petition for European chips.
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"We are marketing entirely nothing in Europe," stated Frank Heemskerk, administrator vice chairman of community affairs at ASML, during speaking at a panel conversation from the Dutch governmental and traditional center De Balie. "Because Europe is not investing and since no part factories are being built in Europe. That is genuinely worrying. […] [Our income portion in Europe is 0%], it used to be 1%."
Indeed, Europe accounted for 1% of ASML's income portion in 2025, 5% in 2024, 4% in 2023, and 2% in 2022, according to the company's presentations for investors. In the archetypal two quarters of 2026, however, Europe accounted for 0% of ASML's revenue, according to ASML's earnings reports.
"There merely is no petition current for these kinds of extremely specialized machines," Heemskerk said. "That is the problem. So distinct from trying to diagram funding alongside chief on the provision side, we should do much additional to create demand. […] So, we at ASML are additionally making an enormous effort, and we are talking alongside Ursula von der Leyen in Europe, saying: 'try to harness the market power and dynamism that ultimately do be in Europe in a figure of areas.'"
So far, the European Union has been eager on subsidizing construction new fabs in Europe (something that did not assistance to lure Intel in). But ASML is calling on European governments to assistance total and justify petition for European-made chips — which volition advance important European part consumers to origin locally, giving semiconductor manufacturers an financial logic to build or develop fabs in Europe.
"We need to create certain that several of those buyers — the customers of our customers — commencement talking much additional closely alongside European manufacturers again. In areas specified as synthetic intellect for industry, for example, there are motionless plentifulness of opportunities that Europe can seize. But you have to arrange this collectively."
New fabs are being built…
That said, the ASML EVP may be too pessimistic concerning Europe's semiconductor industry.
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Intel runs its enormous Fab 34 near Leixlip, Ireland, and lately announced plans to invest €5 milliard in the facility to develop manufacturing of CPUs on Intel 4 and Intel 3 procedure technologies. While the new funding dwarfs Intel's plans to allocate approximately €80 milliard in its Magdeburg, Germany, fab complex, alongside two archetypal fabs solitary accounting for complete €30 billion, it motionless represents Intel's dedication to its Ireland campus.
In addition, ESMC — which is backed by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP — is building a brand-new fab near Dresden that volition disbursal about €15 billion. The fab volition be capable of producing chips using 12nm/16nm-class FinFET and 22nm/28nm planar transistor-based procedure technologies used in a broad range of automotive applications. The identical nodes are additionally used for assorted person electronics and border applications.
Infineon additionally opened its new €5 milliard Smart Power Fab in Dresden in July 2026, which marked the largest sole funding in the company's former and efficiently doubled its manufacturing capability at the site. The 300mm facility produces power semiconductors as fine as analog and mixed-signal chips for automotive, industrial, renewable-energy, and AI data-center applications.
Last but not least, GlobalFoundries officially bankrupt dirt on the latest important enlargement and upgrade of Fab 1 in Dresden this March to addition capability for its specialty procedure technologies, including 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX), embedded non-volatile recollection (eNVM), and the BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) node for power administration ICs. To several degree, the upgrade was forced by headwinds that GlobalFoundries faced whenever construction the €10.4 milliard shared fab alongside STMicroelectronics in the Grenoble, France, region.
With many semiconductor fab projects in location in Europe, ASML volition continue to market its tools to companies in the EU for years to come; the semiconductor industry is far from deceased in the bloc. Of course, the crucial item is that all of these manufacturing accommodation are built by multinational corporations (sometimes in collaboration alongside local companies) — but this is mostly a earth trend fairly than a important issue.
…But there's a catch
Although the fab projects in Europe are ample in conditions of investment, they faint in difference alongside those being built in Taiwan, South Korea, the U.S., and Japan, anywhere tens or equal hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in new semiconductor manufacturing facilities.
What is perchance additional crucial from ASML's standpoint is that none of the ongoing fab projects in Europe are leading-edge fabs set to use EUV and eventually High-NA EUV lithography scanners. The tools that European fabs use today and that new accommodation are set to use in the forthcoming are mature tools that disbursal considerably small than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perchance a involvement for ASML, as the business is naturally curious in marketing its additional advanced and costly equipment.
Another involvement is that equal advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is afterward shipped to another regions for packaging, definition that European companies have mostly misplaced their capability to create advanced chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this method that, for now, there is barely any strategic item for European authorities to create petition for chips that are 'Made in Europe' since they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing author at Tom’s Hardware. Over the former brace of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from contemporary procedure technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
