Europe's own chip equipment maker sold nothing at home this year

ASML Executive Vice President Frank Heemskerk said at an Amsterdam event in September that the company is "selling absolutely nothing in Europe," because, in his words, "Europe is not investing and no chip factories are being built across the continent." Europe accounted for zero percent of ASML's revenue in the first half of 2026.

The number was already falling

Europe's share of ASML revenue was 5 percent in 2024 and 1 percent in 2025, before dropping to zero in the first two quarters of 2026. ASML remains Europe's most valuable public company and the only global supplier of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines advanced chipmaking depends on. It is not short of customers elsewhere.

What Heemskerk actually blamed

"There simply is no demand here for these kinds of highly specialized machines," Heemskerk said. The machines exist. The fabs that would buy them do not, despite years of European Union rhetoric about chip sovereignty and reducing dependence on Asian and American manufacturing.

What the EU has and has not done

The reporting does not detail what specific EU investment programs failed to translate into fab construction, or whether the gap is capital, permitting, energy costs, or something else. Heemskerk named the symptom, zero revenue, not the cause.

Why a build studio cares

Chip sovereignty policy is usually discussed in terms of subsidies announced and legislation passed, and this is the harder number underneath that framing: the company that makes the one machine advanced fabs cannot operate without just reported that nobody in Europe is buying it. For anything we build that assumes EU-based chip supply, cloud capacity, or hosting will get cheaper or more available as sovereignty policy matures, this is evidence the timeline is not moving yet.

Next step: read Tom's Hardware's coverage of Heemskerk's remarks.