ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet on his company’s monopoly: no one is coming for us

Every time you use AI, you are, in some small way, depending on a 42-year-old, 44,000-person Dutch company that spends €4.5 billion each year to advance its technology.

ASML, headquartered in the Netherlands, makes the machines that make the chips that make AI possible. More specifically, it makes the only machines in the world capable of printing the microscopic patterns on silicon wafers that define the most advanced semiconductors — a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. The machines are roughly the size of a school bus, take months to assemble, involve hundreds of suppliers, and cost anywhere from $200 million to upwards of $400 million apiece depending on the generation.

That monopoly has made ASML the most valuable company in Europe, worth over $530 billion. With Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google committing more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone, demand for ASML’s machines has surged to the point where the company has openly said the world won’t have enough chips for years.

Christophe Fouquet, who became ASML’s CEO in 2024 after more than a decade at the company, spoke about the AI boom, rising competition, export controls, and why he believes no one is close to replicating ASML’s technology.

The AI Explosion

Did you see the AI explosion coming?

“No, not at all,” Fouquet said. “We worked very hard, but not with the idea that this would come.”

He described the shift from AI as a distant concept to the release of ChatGPT as a turning point. “Now I think we look at AI as the next revolution, not only industrial but societal,” he said. “Sitting in the middle of it every day, sometimes we wake up in the morning and still check that what is happening is really happening.”

Supply Constraints and Chip Shortages

Can the supply chain keep pace with demand?

“The demand is such that the market overall will be supply-limited for quite a bit,” Fouquet said. He noted that the biggest bottleneck currently appears to be in chip manufacturing.

As an equipment supplier, ASML follows its customers’ expansion plans. “So far we’ve followed them pretty well — but we know we have to step up our entire supply chain and capacity,” he said. Hyperscalers, he added, expect shortages to persist: “For the next two, three, even five years, they’re not going to get enough chips.”

The Cost of High-NA EUV

TSMC has said ASML’s latest machines are too expensive. How do you respond?

Fouquet argued that while the newest high-NA EUV systems are more expensive than previous low-NA EUV systems, they reduce overall chip production costs. “The cost of making a wafer with this tool on some advanced layers will be cheaper. We can get 20%, 30% cost reduction,” he said.

High-NA EUV machines, priced at $350 million or more, are designed for long-term use. “We designed high-NA for the next 10, 20 years,” he said, noting that similar concerns were raised about earlier EUV generations before they became widely adopted.

Rival Claims and Reverse Engineering

A San Francisco startup called Substrate, founded by a protégé of Peter Thiel, has raised more than $100 million and been valued at over $1 billion on the claim that it can build a rival lithography machine.

What does he think of such efforts?

“Wanting to have it and having it — that’s still a huge difference,” Fouquet said. He emphasized that lithography requires not just producing an image, but doing so at high volume, low cost, high speed, and nanometer accuracy.

ASML’s EUV system was built on decades of prior work. “The only reason ASML could build an EUV machine is because 80% of it already existed,” he said. Solving the challenge of generating EUV light alone took 20 years. Although ASML produced its first EUV image 30 years ago, it required two additional decades to turn it into a manufacturing system.

On xLight, a laser startup partly backed by the U.S. government that aims to work with ASML, Fouquet said the company is focused on improving the light source component of EUV systems. While ASML’s existing source can be scaled further, xLight’s approach must still be built and proven. “The only question is whether it provides a performance or cost advantage over what we have,” he said. “The jury is still out.”

Reports have also suggested that former ASML engineers in China may have reverse-engineered its machines. Fouquet rejected that claim. “There is no EUV machine in China — we never shipped any tools there,” he said, adding that ASML tracks all shipped systems and that none are unaccounted for.

Because EUV technology has never been exported to China, he said, there are no people there trained on EUV systems. ASML also created a strict internal separation between employees who can access EUV technology and those who cannot. “The facts point to very little, if any, progress at all,” he said.

Export Controls and the Generation Gap

On export controls, do you agree with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s view that companies should sell globally while keeping their best technology at home?

“I think he’s totally right,” Fouquet said. He pointed to Nvidia’s strategy of selling older-generation chips abroad while maintaining a lead with its newest products.

ASML follows a similar approach. The company currently ships tools to China that are permitted under export controls, but they are based on technology first shipped in 2015. Fouquet noted that Nvidia maintains roughly an eight-generation gap between its most advanced products and those it sells more broadly, while ASML’s gap is closer to two or three generations.

He argued that policymakers must balance restricting access with maintaining commercial opportunity. “Finding the right balance between not doing business at all, losing a major opportunity, and strongly inviting others to compete with you” is key, he said.

“No One Is Coming for Us”

Despite mounting geopolitical tensions and startup ambitions, Fouquet expressed confidence in ASML’s position.

“People like to have the greatest technology, but they tend to forget what it took to build it,” he said. ASML’s systems represent decades of collaboration with suppliers and the integration of complex technologies into a manufacturing platform.

“Many different groups of people solving very difficult problems, and then one company bringing it all together using decades of lithography expertise to turn it into a manufacturing system,” he said. “This is in no way easy. And I think that’s also our best protection. It’s simply what it took to put it together.”