ASML sold Europe zero machines last quarter
ASML's home continent bought none of its systems last quarter while China, Taiwan and Korea took 80% of 2025 sales. The US, China and India are courting its next factory while Brussels rewrites a Chips Act its own auditor says will miss its 20% target.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
A champion with no home customers
ASML's top public-affairs executive, Frank Heemskerk, told an Amsterdam audience on 21 September: "We're not selling anything at all in Europe. That's because Europe isn't investing and because no chip factories are being built there." 1 ASML is Europe's most valuable company and the only maker of the extreme-ultraviolet machines that print the smallest circuitry in AI chips, a monopoly it has held since the late 2010s. 23
The order book is the receipt
Europe contributed nothing to ASML's net system sales in the second quarter, against a 1% slice for Europe, the Middle East and Africa across 2025. 1 On €32.7 billion of full-year sales, the whole region managed €524 million, or 1.6%, of which the Netherlands itself chipped in €4.7 million. 45 China, Taiwan and South Korea took roughly 80% between them, and Korea led the first half of 2026 ahead of Taiwan and China. 14
China, Taiwan and Korea took 80% of ASML's 2025 sales; EMEA took 1.6%
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| China | €9.5B |
| Taiwan | €8.3B |
| South Korea | €8.2B |
| United States | €4.1B |
| Other (residual) | €2.1B |
| EMEA (incl. Netherlands) | €0.52B |
A 20% promise against an 11.7% forecast
The 2023 Chips Act set out to double the bloc's share of global chip production to 20% by 2030. The European Court of Auditors called that "very unlikely" to be met, and the Commission's own forecast has the share rising only from 9.8% in 2022 to 11.7% by 2030. 3 Intel's planned fabs in Magdeburg and Wroclaw were postponed in 2024 and later dropped, and Brussels adopted a Chips Act 2.0 proposal on 3 June to try again. 3 The payer in that arrangement is the European taxpayer, funding a second attempt at chipmaking whose most critical tools, on ASML's own numbers, ship almost entirely abroad.
Brussels promised 20% of world chip output by 2030; its own forecast says 11.7%
- Europe's share of global chip production
- Estimate
Data
| Europe's share of global chip production | |
|---|---|
| 2022 actual | 9.8% |
| 2030 forecast (estimate) | 11.7% |
| 2030 target (estimate) | 20% |
One Dresden fab won't bend an 80% Asian order book
The other side has exhibits. TSMC's fab in Dresden is meant to put Europe back on the tool-order list, and ASML broke ground on 8 September on a new Eindhoven campus with room for up to 20,000 workers. 24 One fab against an 80% Asian order book is a rounding error, and Heemskerk says the next expansion is open to bids.
"We need to scale up our production. We aren't doing that solely in the Netherlands," he said, describing "a fierce competitive battle to get us to do it somewhere else." 1 Washington already hosts a quarter of ASML's research and is asking whether that can be half, while China and India "roll out the reddest of red carpets." 1 The company already employs more than 4,500 people in Taiwan and is hiring 1,000 more there this year; in May it agreed to supply systems, technology and staff to India's first front-end fab at Dholera. 13
Demand is not Europe's problem. Customers are.
Nothing about the empty home market is constraining ASML. Its $200 million EUV machines are all but sold out through 2027, TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix have all set production dates on the $400 million High-NA generation, and JPMorgan puts ASML's share of the whole lithography market at 94%. 2
The second quarter still delivered €9.3 billion of sales and €2.9 billion of net income, with 2026 guidance raised to €43 billion to €45 billion, earned almost entirely abroad. 36 Even the next platform, 12-inch photomasks with a pilot line targeted for 2031, is being built with TSMC, and Samsung has joined it. 78
What to watch
Two decisions frame the next leg of the AI tool chain: the Chips Act rewrite in Brussels, and the ground ASML breaks after Eindhoven. Europe owns the world's most important machine shop, and last quarter it bought none of the machines.
How this brief was made
01Gathered & sourced261 channels · 1,427 articles▾
Agents swept 261 channels and ingested 1,427 articles, then de-duplicated and ranked them for signal.
02Verified & cross-validated8 claims · 22 data feeds▾
Every one of 8 load-bearing claims was checked against primary sources, with 22 live data feeds reconciling the figures and charts.
- 1The Edge Malaysia (Bloomberg wire), "ASML executive says no chipmaking machines sold in Europe, region risks getting left behind", 23 September 2026
- 2Reuters (Toby Sterling), "Analysis: ASML extends chipmaking dominance as customers embrace High NA", 14 September 2026
- 3bne IntelliNews (Ben Aris), "Dutch chip-tool giant ASML sells nothing in Europe as no fabs get built", 23 September 2026
- 4Crypto Briefing, "ASML, Europe's most valuable company, sells almost nothing in Europe", 22 September 2026
- 5ASML, "Q4 2025 and full-year financial results", 28 January 2026
- 6ASML, "Q2 2026 financial results", 15 July 2026
- 7ASML and TSMC press release (GlobeNewswire via Markets Insider), "ASML and TSMC Announce Initiative to Pioneer Industry Transition to Large-Format Photomasks for High NA EUV", 8 September 2026
- 8CNBC (Arjun Kharpal), "TSMC, Samsung commit to ASML's newest chipmaking tools as AI drives demand", 8 September 2026
03Reviewed & edited1 human editor▾
One editor read the draft against the evidence, tuned the framing, and signed off before it shipped.
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AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
