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ASML does not manufacture chips. It manufactures the machines required to produce them. As artificial intelligence and semiconductor demand continue to grow, the company increasingly resembles something more than a technology supplier: a form of strategic infrastructure.
For decades, ASML was viewed primarily as a technology company. Today, it increasingly occupies a position that extends beyond markets and products. In this series, Altair Media explores how ASML became one of the world’s most strategically important enterprises—and what that may mean for the future of Europe and the global technology economy.
What if Elon Musk decided to buy ASML? The question may sound implausible, but it reveals a deeper reality. As technology becomes increasingly strategic, some companies may have evolved beyond ordinary market logic and into critical infrastructure.
Europe’s technological future may depend less on national champions and more on networks of specialised ecosystems. From semiconductors and cloud infrastructure to energy systems and research clusters, competitiveness increasingly emerges from the connections between Europe’s most important capabilities.
The future of Europe’s semiconductor strategy may depend less on producing everything at home and more on controlling critical technologies. Chips Act 2.0 signals a shift towards technological indispensability, infrastructure resilience and long-term strategic competitiveness.
For years, Europe spoke about digital sovereignty as a long-term ambition. With the launch of the Tech Sovereignty Package and Chips Act 2.0, that ambition is beginning to take institutional form. This series explores how semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, AI and energy are becoming part of a broader European strategy to reduce critical dependencies and strengthen technological resilience.
Artificial intelligence is often discussed as a software revolution. Increasingly, however, AI is revealing itself as something much larger: an industrial system built upon energy, semiconductors, infrastructure and global supply chains. As intelligence scales, the real competition may shift from algorithms toward the ecosystems capable of sustaining them.
As AI systems become larger and more complex, advanced packaging is emerging as one of the semiconductor industry’s most critical bottlenecks — transforming the back-end of chip manufacturing into strategic infrastructure.
As AI infrastructure transforms the semiconductor industry, Italy is emerging as one of Europe’s most important hubs for advanced packaging, systems integration and the physical architecture connecting future computing systems.
As Europe rethinks the original ambitions of the Chips Act, a new semiconductor strategy is emerging — one focused less on scale and more on control over the critical technological layers underpinning modern infrastructure.
