ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet on his company’s monopoly: no one is coming for us

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The machines are roughly the size of a school bus, take months to assemble, involve hundreds of suppliers, and cost anywhere from $200 million to upwards of $400 million apiece depending on the generation (prices that give even ASML’s biggest customers pause occasionally). That monopoly has made ASML the most valuable company in Europe, worth over $530 billion. And with the four largest American tech companies — Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google — committing more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone, demand for ASML’s machines has surged to the point where the company has openly said the world won’t have enough chips for years.

All that demand has also made ASML a target. Substrate, a San Francisco startup founded by a protégé of Peter Thiel, has raised more than $100 million and been valued at over $1 billion on the claim that it can build a rival lithography machine. Separately, there have been reports that former ASML engineers in China have partly reverse-engineered the technology, a prospect with enormous geopolitical implications.

Christophe Fouquet, who became ASML’s CEO in 2024 after more than a decade at the company, sat down with this editor on the rooftop deck of his Beverly Hills hotel Tuesday morning ahead of his appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, he was relaxed — even when the conversation turned to rivals. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Did you see the AI explosion coming? var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7d4142cb2f9 = jwplayer( "jwplayer_6a7d4142cb2f9" ); playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7d4142cb2f9.setup(); No, not at all. We worked very hard, but not with the idea that this would come. You went from a concept — something people thought would eventually arrive — to ChatGPT, which was really the first good example of what AI could do.

And now I think we look at AI as the next revolution, not only industrial but societal. Sitting in the middle of it every day, sometimes we wake up in the morning and still check that what is happening is really happening. The big question everyone has is whether the supply chain can keep pace with demand.