ASML's European Revenue Share Has Fallen to Zero

ASML's European revenue share is zero. Frank Heemskerk, the company's executive vice president for global public affairs, said so at a public event at De Balie in Amsterdam on 21 September 2026, putting the figure against 1 per cent in the 2025 financial year and a recent high of 5 per cent in 2024. DataCenterDynamics, which reported his remarks, quoted him saying that because "Europe is not investing and ... no chip factories are being built" across the continent, the company is "selling absolutely nothing in Europe". He called that "genuinely worrying". Bloomberg reported on the same panel the following day.

The number is easy to misread as a company in trouble on home ground. It is not. ASML reported second-quarter 2026 net sales of €9.3 billion and net income of €2.9 billion on 15 July, and raised full-year guidance to between €43 billion and €45 billion. Chief executive Christophe Fouquet said after those results that ASML was "pretty much already close" to receiving all the EUV orders it needs for 2027, "this is with us adding about 30 percent capacity for EUV in 2027 versus 2026", and that the company had begun exploring a further increase of about 30 per cent for 2028. On 8 September, Samsung and ASML announced an expansion of their partnership covering High NA EUV, one of two such commitments from leading foundries that month.

Europe is building the wrong tier of fab

Zero is a statement about product mix, not about European industrial activity. Money is going into European semiconductor manufacturing. Intel has pledged €5 billion (about $5.7 billion) to expand capacity at its Leixlip campus in Ireland. The European Commission approved a €5 billion state aid package in 2024 for the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fab in Dresden, a TSMC-led venture in which NXP, Infineon and Bosch each hold 10 per cent. Infineon and GlobalFoundries are both building in Germany.

None of it needs an EUV machine. ASML is the only supplier in the world of extreme ultraviolet and High NA EUV lithography, the tools required to print the most advanced nodes, and a High NA unit costs roughly $370 million. European fabs under construction are aimed at mature automotive and industrial processes, where 193-nanometre deep-ultraviolet immersion lithography is sufficient and far cheaper to run. So the continent can pour capital into wafer capacity and still generate no order for the product line that carries ASML's revenue. As Parallax Nexus reported on 8 September, when the industry aligned on moving to 12-inch photomasks, the roadmap for High NA runs through TSMC and Samsung, with TSMC targeting high-volume manufacturing from 2030.

The demand side Brussels left out

Heemskerk's argument in Amsterdam was not that Europe should subsidise more, but that it has been subsidising the wrong end of the transaction. Fabs are built against order books. No operator commits several billion euros to a leading-edge line without buyers who have agreed in advance to take the output, and no European buyer has done so at that scale. "We need to make sure that some of those buyers ... start talking much more closely with European manufacturers again," he said, according to DataCenterDynamics. "In areas such as artificial intelligence for industry, for example, there are still plenty of opportunities that Europe can seize. But you have to organize this collectively." He said ASML has taken the case to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen directly.

Europe's own auditors reached a version of this conclusion before Heemskerk did. The European Court of Auditors, in special report 12/2025 on the EU's strategy for microchips, found that the bloc's share of the global semiconductor value chain would rise only slightly, to 11.7 per cent in 2030, against the Chips Act target of 20 per cent. The auditors recommended the Commission carry out an urgent reality check on the Act's ambitions in light of available resources, global competition and structural factors including energy costs and raw material dependencies.

What Chips Act 2.0 changes, and when

The Commission has absorbed the critique on paper. On 3 June 2026 it adopted a proposal for the Chips Act 2.0, COM(2026) 504, inside the European Technological Sovereignty Package alongside the Cloud and AI Development Act. The proposal repeals and replaces Regulation (EU) 2023/1781 and, for the first time, treats demand as a policy instrument in its own right: "Demand Accelerators", public and innovation procurement, a business-to-business supply chain platform, and explicit synergies with the cloud and AI legislation covering data centres and AI gigafactories.

It is a proposal. The European Parliament and the Council have yet to take positions, trilogues follow, and the indicative target for concluding negotiations is the second quarter of 2027. Funding beyond 2027 depends on the next multiannual financial framework, which is itself unsettled. On the timeline that matters to a fab, demand aggregation is at least three years from being a commitment a lender would price.

The honest reading is that ASML's zero is a symptom of a policy sequencing error rather than a European decline, and that Heemskerk is describing a problem the Commission now agrees with but cannot fix on his schedule. The uncomfortable part for Brussels is that a company with a genuine monopoly on the most strategically consequential machine in the world, headquartered in the Netherlands, is telling European politicians it has no European customers for it while the United States, China and India court its expansion.

Two things are not established. Whether the EU can lawfully steer buyers toward domestically fabricated chips at scale is untested against its own procurement rules and its World Trade Organization commitments, and the Commission's own competition directorate has not ruled on the instruments in the proposal. And ASML has not yet published the regional breakdown for its third quarter, so whether the European figure stays at zero for a full calendar year is not yet a matter of record.