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Universities were built upon openness, collaboration and scientific exchange. Yet as semiconductors, photonics and artificial intelligence become strategic technologies, Europe increasingly faces a difficult question: how open can science remain when knowledge itself becomes infrastructure?
Hydrogen is often presented as an energy technology. Yet its deeper significance may lie elsewhere. As Europe seeks to decarbonise industry, transport and chemistry, hydrogen is emerging as a mechanism for storing, transporting and coordinating matter itself.
Europe’s future may depend less on scale and more on capabilities that the rest of the world cannot easily replicate. Through the lens of ASML, this concluding essay explores how technological sovereignty, ecosystem resilience and strategic indispensability may shape Europe’s economic future.
Behind ASML lies a broader European ecosystem stretching from Eindhoven and Leuven to Dresden and Grenoble. Understanding the future of ASML may therefore require understanding the networks of expertise, research and industrial collaboration that surround it.
ASML helped define the technological architecture of the modern semiconductor industry. Yet history suggests that every control point eventually faces new challenges. The company’s next test may not be achieving leadership, but maintaining relevance as technology, markets and geopolitics continue to evolve.
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.
A joint statement by Airbus, ASML, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP and Siemens signals a deeper shift in European technology strategy. Beyond sovereignty and regulation, Europe increasingly appears focused on building the infrastructure, ecosystems and critical control points that make it indispensable within the global AI economy.
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.
