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Some numbers require pages of analysis before their geopolitical significance becomes clear. Others almost explain the problem by themselves.
0%.
That was Europe’s share of ASML’s revenue in the first half of 2026, according to the company’s reported figures. Europe had accounted for 1% in 2025 and 5% in 2024. Commenting on the situation, ASML Executive Vice President Frank Heemskerk put it more starkly: the company was selling “absolutely nothing” in Europe.
The irony should be difficult for European policymakers to miss.
ASML is not simply another successful European technology company. It occupies one of the most consequential positions in the entire global semiconductor production system. It is the world’s sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, the machines required to manufacture the most advanced generations of semiconductors.
Its technological position is becoming more important, not less. In July 2026, ASML announced that Intel Foundry had begun using its High-NA EUV technology in high-volume manufacturing on selected layers of Intel’s 18A process. By September, ASML and Intel reported that more than one million wafers had been processed across certification, R&D and production activities involving High-NA systems.
In other words, Europe is home to one of the clearest technological chokepoints in the global economy. Yet the industrial ecosystem making intensive use of that chokepoint is overwhelmingly being built elsewhere. That distinction matters.
The geopolitical discussion around semiconductors often begins with a simple question: who controls the critical technology?
In ASML’s case, the answer appears reassuring from a European perspective. The company is Dutch. Its most sophisticated machines are developed and assembled in Europe. Without them, producing leading-edge chips becomes extraordinarily difficult.
But this is only the first part of the strategic equation. A technological chokepoint creates potential leverage. It does not automatically create a complete technological ecosystem, industrial depth or the ability to convert technological advantage into broader economic and strategic capability.
Europe increasingly illustrates the difference. ASML’s order book is strong. Demand generated by AI investment is accelerating requirements for advanced logic and memory chips, and the company is expanding capacity accordingly.
The problem is not that the technology lacks demand.
The problem is where that demand is being generated. The leading-edge semiconductor production systems surrounding ASML’s machines are being expanded primarily in the United States and Asia. Europe certainly retains semiconductor manufacturing and important companies, and several substantial fabrication projects are under construction. But many of these facilities focus on mature or specialised nodes rather than the advanced processes requiring the most sophisticated EUV systems.
This produces an uncomfortable strategic configuration.
Europe supplies an indispensable machine.
Other economies build much of the industrial capability around it.
This is precisely where discussions of European “technological sovereignty” can become misleading.
Possessing a critical company does not by itself constitute sovereignty.
Nor does subsidising factories necessarily solve the problem.
The deeper question is whether Europe can convert technological assets into functioning capability.
That requires more than invention. It requires industrialisation, demand, complementary infrastructure, capital, skilled labour, supply chains, customers willing to buy European output and organisations capable of integrating the resulting technologies at scale.
The ASML case therefore exposes a broader problem in European technology policy: Europe often performs strongly at particular points in the technological chain while struggling to connect those points into a sufficiently powerful system.
This distinction is becoming particularly important in artificial intelligence. Advanced AI capability depends on much more than possessing strong researchers or regulating powerful models. It depends on compute infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, data centres, cloud platforms, deployment capacity and firms able to absorb AI into productive activity.
A continent can therefore possess world-class technological components while still depending on others for the systems through which those components generate strategic effects.
ASML may be the most striking example because the contradiction is so visible.
The company sits at the centre of one of the hardest technological bottlenecks humanity has built.
And according to its own executive, in 2026 it was effectively finding no domestic European market for its machines.
For years, the standard diagnosis of Europe’s technology problem has been that it needs more innovation.
That diagnosis is increasingly incomplete.
Europe clearly does need innovation. But ASML itself demonstrates that Europe is capable of producing technology at the absolute frontier.
The more difficult question begins afterwards.
These are different questions from whether Europe can produce excellent science or globally competitive individual companies.
And they require a different policy vocabulary.
The ASML story should therefore not be read simply as another warning about Europe “falling behind” the United States or Asia.
It reveals something more specific.
Europe already possesses some of the assets that geopolitical competition increasingly revolves around. Its weakness lies partly in connecting them.
A chokepoint without an ecosystem remains extraordinarily valuable. But it is not the same thing as a complete capability.
And if Europe continues to confuse the possession of critical technological assets with the capacity to convert them into power, it may eventually discover that one of the most important machines in the twenty-first-century economy is European while much of the strategic system built around it is not.
That is the question behind ASML’s extraordinary zero.
Europe does not only need to ask what technologies it controls.
It needs to ask what it is actually capable of doing with them.
0%.
That was Europe’s share of ASML’s revenue in the first half of 2026, according to the company’s reported figures. Europe had accounted for 1% in 2025 and 5% in 2024. Commenting on the situation, ASML Executive Vice President Frank Heemskerk put it more starkly: the company was selling “absolutely nothing” in Europe.
The irony should be difficult for European policymakers to miss.
ASML is not simply another successful European technology company. It occupies one of the most consequential positions in the entire global semiconductor production system. It is the world’s sole supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, the machines required to manufacture the most advanced generations of semiconductors.
Its technological position is becoming more important, not less. In July 2026, ASML announced that Intel Foundry had begun using its High-NA EUV technology in high-volume manufacturing on selected layers of Intel’s 18A process. By September, ASML and Intel reported that more than one million wafers had been processed across certification, R&D and production activities involving High-NA systems.
In other words, Europe is home to one of the clearest technological chokepoints in the global economy. Yet the industrial ecosystem making intensive use of that chokepoint is overwhelmingly being built elsewhere. That distinction matters.
Owning a chokepoint is not the same as possessing technological power
The geopolitical discussion around semiconductors often begins with a simple question: who controls the critical technology?
In ASML’s case, the answer appears reassuring from a European perspective. The company is Dutch. Its most sophisticated machines are developed and assembled in Europe. Without them, producing leading-edge chips becomes extraordinarily difficult.
But this is only the first part of the strategic equation. A technological chokepoint creates potential leverage. It does not automatically create a complete technological ecosystem, industrial depth or the ability to convert technological advantage into broader economic and strategic capability.
Europe increasingly illustrates the difference. ASML’s order book is strong. Demand generated by AI investment is accelerating requirements for advanced logic and memory chips, and the company is expanding capacity accordingly.
The problem is not that the technology lacks demand.
The problem is where that demand is being generated. The leading-edge semiconductor production systems surrounding ASML’s machines are being expanded primarily in the United States and Asia. Europe certainly retains semiconductor manufacturing and important companies, and several substantial fabrication projects are under construction. But many of these facilities focus on mature or specialised nodes rather than the advanced processes requiring the most sophisticated EUV systems.
This produces an uncomfortable strategic configuration.
Europe supplies an indispensable machine.
Other economies build much of the industrial capability around it.
From technological sovereignty to capability conversion
This is precisely where discussions of European “technological sovereignty” can become misleading.
Possessing a critical company does not by itself constitute sovereignty.
Nor does subsidising factories necessarily solve the problem.
The deeper question is whether Europe can convert technological assets into functioning capability.
That requires more than invention. It requires industrialisation, demand, complementary infrastructure, capital, skilled labour, supply chains, customers willing to buy European output and organisations capable of integrating the resulting technologies at scale.
The ASML case therefore exposes a broader problem in European technology policy: Europe often performs strongly at particular points in the technological chain while struggling to connect those points into a sufficiently powerful system.
This distinction is becoming particularly important in artificial intelligence. Advanced AI capability depends on much more than possessing strong researchers or regulating powerful models. It depends on compute infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, data centres, cloud platforms, deployment capacity and firms able to absorb AI into productive activity.
A continent can therefore possess world-class technological components while still depending on others for the systems through which those components generate strategic effects.
ASML may be the most striking example because the contradiction is so visible.
The company sits at the centre of one of the hardest technological bottlenecks humanity has built.
And according to its own executive, in 2026 it was effectively finding no domestic European market for its machines.
Europe’s problem may no longer be invention
For years, the standard diagnosis of Europe’s technology problem has been that it needs more innovation.
That diagnosis is increasingly incomplete.
Europe clearly does need innovation. But ASML itself demonstrates that Europe is capable of producing technology at the absolute frontier.
The more difficult question begins afterwards.
- What happens when Europe invents something strategically indispensable?
- Can it create the production ecosystems that use it?
- Can it generate sufficient demand?
- Can European firms scale alongside it?
- Can the continent retain downstream industrial activity?
- Can technological advantage be converted into economic capacity and eventually into geopolitical influence?
These are different questions from whether Europe can produce excellent science or globally competitive individual companies.
And they require a different policy vocabulary.
The ASML story should therefore not be read simply as another warning about Europe “falling behind” the United States or Asia.
It reveals something more specific.
Europe already possesses some of the assets that geopolitical competition increasingly revolves around. Its weakness lies partly in connecting them.
A chokepoint without an ecosystem remains extraordinarily valuable. But it is not the same thing as a complete capability.
And if Europe continues to confuse the possession of critical technological assets with the capacity to convert them into power, it may eventually discover that one of the most important machines in the twenty-first-century economy is European while much of the strategic system built around it is not.
That is the question behind ASML’s extraordinary zero.
Europe does not only need to ask what technologies it controls.
It needs to ask what it is actually capable of doing with them.