ASML (AMS: ASML), Europe's most valuable company, is not selling a single chipmaking machine in Europe because no one on the continent is building chip plants, a senior executive has said.

"We're not selling anything at all in Europe. That's because Europe isn't investing and because no chip factories are being built there," Frank Heemskerk, the Dutch company's executive vice president for global public affairs, told an event in Amsterdam on September 21, Bloomberg reported on September 22.

The remark lays bare the gap between Brussels' talk of chip sovereignty and what is happening on the ground: the only company in the world that makes the extreme ultraviolet lithography tools needed for cutting-edge chips earns its money in Asia and the US, while the EU's Chips Act has failed to pull new fabs into the bloc.

Europe accounted for 0% of ASML's net system sales in the second quarter, compared with a 1% share for Europe, the Middle East and Africa combined in 2025. South Korea was its biggest market in the first half, followed by Taiwan and China. The company reported total net sales of €9.3bn and net income of €2.9bn for the quarter in July, and raised its full-year sales guidance to €43bn-45bn on demand driven by artificial intelligence.

Heemskerk said ASML, whose machines are used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TPE: 2330) and Samsung Electronics (KRX: 005930) to print transistors on silicon wafers, is being aggressively courted to expand in the US, China and India.

"We need to scale up our production. We aren't doing that solely in the Netherlands," he said. "There is a fierce competitive battle to get us to do it somewhere else. What's important for ASML is that Europe steps up to the plate."

China and India "roll out the reddest of red carpets" to persuade it to build factories there, he said, while Washington, where ASML already carries out a quarter of its research, is asking whether that share could rise to half.

The company is already putting down roots outside Europe. In May it signed an agreement with Tata Electronics to supply lithography systems, technology and staff for India's first front-end fab at Dholera in Gujarat, and said it would hire 1,000 more people in Taiwan this year, where it already employs more than 4,500.

The EU's Chips Act, which came into force in 2023 after the pandemic-era chip shortage, set a goal of doubling the bloc's share of global chip production to 20% by 2030. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that the target is "very unlikely" to be met, noting that the European Commission's own forecast has the EU's share rising only from 9.8% in 2022 to 11.7% by 2030.

The biggest projects meant to anchor the act have fallen away. Fabs that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) planned in Magdeburg in Germany and Wroclaw in Poland were postponed in 2024 and later dropped altogether. The Commission adopted a Chips Act 2.0 proposal on June 3 to revive the effort.

Some campaigners want Brussels to go much further. The pan-European advocacy account NXT EU argued on X that Europe should copy Japan, which is bankrolling Rapidus to make 2nm chips at home, and set up a common European programme to build frontier fabs in several countries. "One is not enough," it said.