Why a company in Veldhoven became one of the most geopolitically significant things the Netherlands has
Part of: Dutch Economy
ASML is a Dutch company headquartered in Veldhoven (near Eindhoven) that makes the machines used to manufacture advanced computer chips. It's not a chip company itself — it makes the equipment that chip companies like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel need to make chips.
It is, by a wide margin, the most strategically important company in the Netherlands. Its EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines are so complex and so far ahead of any competitor that there is no alternative — if you want to make the most advanced chips in the world, you need ASML's machines. No other company on earth can make them.
The chip war between the US and China has turned ASML into a geopolitical battleground.
China wants ASML's machines to build a domestic semiconductor industry. The US wants to stop them. The Dutch government is caught in between — ASML is Dutch, but the US has enormous leverage (and ASML itself uses some American technology, which gives the US legal grounds to pressure the Netherlands).
Since 2019, the Dutch government has blocked the export of ASML's most advanced EUV machines to China under US pressure, without ever announcing a formal policy. Since 2023, restrictions have expanded further. China is ASML's largest market — or was.
The Dutch government's position is awkward: they want to maintain the transatlantic relationship, they've accepted US pressure, but they're also watching a major Dutch company lose its biggest customer. ASML employs tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands directly and indirectly — it effectively props up the Brainport Eindhoven region's entire economy.
In May 2026, during Indian PM Modi's visit to The Hague, ASML signed a memorandum of understanding with Tata Electronics — which is building a major chip factory in India. The deal is about "expertise exchange and technology delivery."
This is partly strategic: as China becomes inaccessible as a market, the Netherlands is trying to build relationships with India as an alternative. India wants chip-making capability; the Netherlands wants to reduce dependence on Chinese demand. The Modi visit was explicitly framed as the Netherlands seeking "a strategic partnership when the country wants to reduce dependence on China and the US."
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