Forget TSMC or Nvidia! This Dutch company quietly controls the global chip industry
Even as Taiwan and China are the largest chip-manufacturing countries in the world.
When most people think of the chip industry, the first names that come to mind are the familiar ones: TSMC, NVIDIA, Intel, or AMD.
Nvidia GPUs have become the engines of artificial intelligence. Intel was once synonymous with computing power, and AMD is the perennial challenger. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s TSMC is the undisputed leader in manufacturing. These are the companies that dominate headlines, the ones you see plastered across investor slides and tech blogs. They are, in many ways, the public face of Silicon.
But behind all of them sits a company that very few outside the industry could even name. It does not design chips nor does it manufacture them. It never does annual product launches or keynote stages either. And yet, without this company, none of the advanced chip technology produced by these popular names could exist.
It is a company located in the Netherlands. that provides the technology that allows these popular names to build the silicon brains that power your iPhone, the data centres that run the internet, your car, and even the AI models now pretending to be your co-worker. In essence, the AI revolution, and pretty much every piece of advanced tech, hinges on the technology that this company provides. That company is the Dutch multinational corporation Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML).
The EUV lithography machine
To understand ASML’s power, you first need to understand what it sells. The company does not make chips, but it makes the machines that make microchips. And among those machines is one unlike anything else humans have ever built.
