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ASML asks the EU to guarantee chip demand after Europe's revenue share hit zero
Europe accounted for 0% of ASML's revenue in the first half of 2026, and the company's public affairs chief blames missing demand for European-made chips. Four European fab projects ran through the same period.
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What happened
- ASML's earnings reports put Europe at 0% of company revenue for the first two quarters of 2026, down from 1% for the whole of 2025.
- Frank Heemskerk, ASML's executive vice president of public affairs, said on the Dutch programme De Balie that the company is selling absolutely nothing in Europe.
- Tom's Hardware, which reported the remarks, wrote that the ASML executive may be too pessimistic, and pointed to fab projects running in Ireland and Dresden.
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Why it matters
- contradiction Heemskerk's statement that no chip factories are being built in Europe cannot stand beside the named projects in Leixlip and Dresden, so the 0% survives only as a statement about who took tool deliveries in two quarters.
- decision Anyone using ASML's revenue geography as a proxy for European supply resilience needs a different input, because the figure tracks delivery timing at ASML's customers rather than installed capacity by node.
- cost A demand guarantee moves the public commitment from the fab's construction budget onto the purchase orders of European chip consumers, so the customers of ASML's customers carry it.
A geographic revenue split records shipments accepted in a quarter. Infineon opened its 5 billion euro Smart Power Fab in Dresden in July 2026, an opening that doubled its manufacturing capacity at that site [16]. July falls after the two quarters that report 0% [2]. Those tools were ordered and installed earlier. GlobalFoundries broke ground on its Fab 1 expansion in Dresden in March [17].
The series was small in every year. Europe was 2% of ASML's revenue in 2022, 4% in 2023, 5% in 2024 and 1% in 2025, based on the company's investor presentations [4]. Even in the best of those years, 95% of the revenue came from outside Europe [1]. The step Heemskerk described on Dutch television is one percentage point wide [3].
"There simply is no demand here for these kinds of highly specialized machines," Heemskerk said [8]. His proposed instrument works on the buyers: ASML wants European governments to help aggregate and guarantee demand for European-made chips, so that large European chip consumers source locally and manufacturers get an economic reason to build or expand [11]. "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 [12]. Tom's Hardware reports that the EU's approach so far has been subsidising fab construction, and that this did not help lure Intel in [10]. Intel's Magdeburg complex was planned at roughly 80 billion euros, with the first two fabs alone above 30 billion [14].
For a 0% line to support a claim about unchanged supply concentration, capacity at the nodes a buyer actually uses would have to be flat. At the coarse end it is rising. ESMC's roughly 15 billion euro Dresden fab, backed by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon and NXP, will run 12nm/16nm FinFET and 22nm/28nm planar processes for automotive and consumer parts [15]. GlobalFoundries is adding 22FDX, embedded non-volatile memory and BCD capacity [17]. Infineon's new Dresden line makes power, analog and mixed-signal devices on 300mm wafers [16]. The only advanced-logic entry on the list is Intel's 5 billion euro Leixlip expansion for Intel 4 and Intel 3 [13]. A diversification plan that needs leading-edge logic fabbed inside the EU depends on that one site.
The zero is a reported share; Tom's Hardware also states that European chipmakers bought no lithography equipment from ASML in 2026 [5]. Some of these projects are under strain. GlobalFoundries' Dresden upgrade was to some degree forced by headwinds on the 10.4 billion euro joint fab with STMicroelectronics in the Grenoble region [18].
What to watch
- Whether ASML's third-quarter 2026 report puts Europe back above 0% as the ESMC and GlobalFoundries projects in Dresden reach tool installation.
- Whether the European Commission turns demand aggregation into an actual instrument with a named buyer, a budget and a term.
- Whether Intel converts the 5 billion euro Leixlip plan into tool orders, and what becomes of the Magdeburg complex.