Plenty of locations declare they’re Europe’s reply to Silicon Valley: Stockholm boasts probably the most unicorns per capita, and London is the continent’s VC hub. But solely the small Dutch city of Veldhoven—whose inhabitants numbers 45,000—is residence to the closest factor Europe has to a giant tech big.
From its unassuming base close to the Belgian border, ASML, an organization that builds the machines that make semiconductor chips, has mushroomed to develop into a vital cog within the international know-how trade. At the tip of 2021, it was named Europe’s largest public tech firm by market cap, boosted by the pandemic demand for units and the worldwide chip scarcity. Spun out from Dutch electronics big Philips in 1984, ASML allows different corporations to make semiconductor chips—the technological brains in telephones, automobiles, computer systems, and good houses. Experts describe ASML as a bottleneck: The firm claims it has between 80 and 85 p.c share of the full marketplace for lithography methods that make semiconductors. When it involves probably the most superior sort of chipmaking lithography machine, often called excessive ultraviolet lithography (EUV), that market share surges to 100 p.c.
But regardless of ASML’s latest momentum, there’s one space of uncertainty on the horizon. As a results of commerce tensions between Washington and Beijing, the corporate has been blocked from promoting its most superior machines to China. Although the nation presently solely sells 7.6 percent of the world’s chips, in response to the Semiconductor Industry Association, this quantity is rising quick and chips are one in every of seven applied sciences Beijing has targeted for development. Attempts to dam China from the worldwide provide chain has created concern that the nation will rush to develop its personal model of ASML, threatening the Dutch firm’s outsized affect over the semiconductor market.
Thanks to the gamble ASML took within the 1990s to pursue the event of EUV know-how, which makes use of tiny rays of sunshine to carve patterns on the silicon items that type semiconductor chips, the corporate’s dominance on this space is presently unchallenged. ASML estimates its most superior know-how is so complicated, it could take no less than 15 years for others to duplicate.
“Several of the companies that were competitive [in the 1990s] decided not to take the risk investing in EUV because it seemed like it would be so difficult, so expensive and possibly never work,” says Chris Miller, assistant professor of worldwide historical past at Tufts University, who’s writing a guide on the geopolitical historical past of the pc chip. As a results of that wager, ASML’s valuation has swollen to over $300 billion and its share value has greater than doubled for the reason that begin of 2020. Speculation is mounting that it might develop into Europe’s first firm to be valued above $1 trillion.
The shift to EUV was lengthy and costly. The firm needed to persuade its clients — together with Intel, Samsung and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—to purchase stakes within the firm so there was sufficient cash to fund the analysis. By the time it was in a position to launch its first industrial EUV machines in 2017, the method had price $9 billion. But the payoff was big. It is now the one firm in a position to provide EUV machines, which take advantage of superior sort of chips present in newer telephones and video games consoles, to trade giants like TSMC or Intel. As of September 2021, the corporate had bought 125 EUV machines. That won’t sound like a lot, however there aren’t quite a lot of corporations which can be able to manufacturing probably the most superior sort of chips utilizing these machines and ASML sells them for greater than $100 million every.
