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The Tradition of Knowledge Behind ASML


Europe’s most valuable tech company is the only manufacturer of the machines needed to make advanced computer chips. This market monopoly rests on a Dutch tradition of knowledge and industrial policy.

This “scaling hypothesis,” as opposed to building artificial intelligence through novel architecture or data sets for training, necessarily relies on vastly increasing manufacturing of the most advanced chips, which so far can only be done by expanding the operations of a handful of companies like TSMC, Intel, or Samsung. The company is arguably the single hardest layer to recreate in the chip manufacturing stack, not only because of the vast capital costs that would be necessary to build the complex machines, but also because its success rests on a unique Dutch tradition of knowledge in photolithography that goes back to the 1960s, if not earlier. Van Heek co-developed it with his colleague Gijs Bouwhuis at the physics and materials research laboratory of the Dutch electronics conglomerate Philips, called NatLab, which was comparable in size and scope to, for example, AT&T’s famous Bell Labs.

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