>ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech?

My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW)

Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?

Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it from here?

Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil.

Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China.

US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition.

>Tech couldn't exist without ASML...

False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either.

Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence versus their Japanese competitors.

Longer story:

"The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA.

Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details.

The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1]

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319