ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026 — lithography giant calls on EU to help create demand

As the world's only supplier of EUV lithography systems, ASML is Europe's largest company by market capitalization, currently valued at around $660 billion. But it earned almost nothing in Europe this year, down from 1% of total profits in 2025 and 5% in 2024. Why? European chipmakers bought no lithography equipment from ASML in 2026 — and the company is calling on EU authorities to help create demand for European chips.

"We are selling absolutely nothing in Europe," said Frank Heemskerk, executive vice president of public affairs at ASML, while speaking at a panel discussion from the Dutch political and cultural center De Balie. "Because Europe is not investing and because no chip factories are being built in Europe. That is genuinely worrying. […] [Our revenue share in Europe is 0%], it used to be 1%."

Indeed, Europe accounted for 1% of ASML's revenue share in 2025, 5% in 2024, 4% in 2023, and 2% in 2022, based on the company's presentations for investors. In the first two quarters of 2026, however, Europe accounted for 0% of ASML's revenue, according to ASML's earnings reports.

"There simply is no demand here for these kinds of highly specialized machines," Heemskerk said. "That is the problem. So apart from trying to attract investment with capital on the supply side, we should do much more to create demand. […] So, we at ASML are also making an enormous effort, and we are talking with Ursula von der Leyen in Europe, saying: 'try to harness the market power and dynamism that ultimately do exist in Europe in a number of areas.'"

So far, the European Union has been keen on subsidizing building new fabs in Europe (something that did not help to lure Intel in). But ASML is calling on European governments to help aggregate and guarantee demand for European-made chips — which will encourage major European chip consumers to source locally, giving semiconductor manufacturers an economic reason to build or expand fabs in Europe.

"We need to make sure that some of those buyers — the customers of our customers — start talking much more closely with European manufacturers again. In areas such as artificial intelligence for industry, for example, there are still plenty of opportunities that Europe can seize. But you have to organize this collectively."

New fabs are being built…

That said, the ASML EVP may be too pessimistic about Europe's semiconductor industry.

Intel runs its massive Fab 34 near Leixlip, Ireland, and recently announced plans to invest €5 billion in the facility to expand production of CPUs on Intel 4 and Intel 3 process technologies. While the new investment dwarfs Intel's plans to invest roughly €80 billion in its Magdeburg, Germany, fab complex, with two first fabs alone accounting for over €30 billion, it still represents Intel's commitment 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 will cost around €15 billion. The fab will be capable of producing chips using 12nm/16nm-class FinFET and 22nm/28nm planar transistor-based process technologies used in a wide range of automotive applications. The same nodes are also used for various consumer electronics and edge applications.

Infineon also opened its new €5 billion Smart Power Fab in Dresden in July 2026, which marked the largest single investment in the company's history and effectively doubled its manufacturing capacity at the site. The 300mm facility produces power semiconductors as well as analog and mixed-signal chips for automotive, industrial, renewable-energy, and AI data-center applications.

Last but not least, GlobalFoundries officially broke ground on the latest major expansion and upgrade of Fab 1 in Dresden this March to increase capacity for its specialty process technologies, including 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX), embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM), and the BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) node for power management ICs. To some degree, the upgrade was forced by headwinds that GlobalFoundries faced when building the €10.4 billion joint fab with STMicroelectronics in the Grenoble, France, region.

With numerous semiconductor fab projects in place in Europe, ASML will continue to sell its tools to companies in the EU for years to come; the semiconductor industry is far from dead in the bloc. Of course, the important detail is that all of these production facilities are built by multinational corporations (sometimes in collaboration with local companies) — but this is largely a global trend rather than a major issue.

…But there's a catch

Although the fab projects in Europe are large in terms of investment, they pale in comparison with those being built in Taiwan, South Korea, the U.S., and Japan, where tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in new semiconductor production facilities.

What is perhaps more important 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 facilities are set to use in the future are mature tools that cost considerably less than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perhaps a concern for ASML, as the company is naturally interested in selling its more sophisticated and expensive equipment.

Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because 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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