Post by Ali Nejadmalayeri, Ph.D., CFA

The Giant that Almost Never Was ... Not because the technology was too bold — but because it was too boring. In the early 1980s, Philips didn’t spin off ASML to create a tech champion. They spun it off to get it off the books. Lithography was capital-intensive. Margins were thin. Progress was slow. It didn’t fit Philips’ consumer-electronics identity. So Philips parked the activity in a joint venture with ASM International. No grand vision. No press releases. No founder mythology. Just a small team in Veldhoven working on machines that mostly lost money. What changed everything wasn’t a breakthrough — it was two people refusing to quit. --- @Wim Troost , ASML’s first CEO, believed Europe had to stay in semiconductor equipment. --- @Martin van den Brink, a young engineer who joined in 1985, became obsessed with a question others avoided: “What if we build the most precise machine humans have ever made — even if it takes decades?” For years, ASML was written off: Japanese competitors were ahead Customers doubted their reliability EUV lithography was called unworkable by experts Internally, EUV survived not because it was profitable — but because van den Brink protected it relentlessly. Budgets were thin. Timelines slipped by years. Failures piled up. Yet ASML kept going. Not because of speed. Not because of hype. But because patient engineering compounded quietly. Today, ASML is the irreplaceable choke point of modern computing: No EUV machine → no advanced AI chips No alternative supplier → no workaround Each system embeds decades of stubborn decisions ASML wasn’t built by visionaries chasing disruption. It was built by engineers who refused to abandon a hard problem. The uncomfortable lesson: The companies that shape the future often start as accounting inconveniences. And the people who change history rarely look like "founders" at the time. #ASML #Semiconductors #TSMC #NVIDIA #AI #DeepTech #EngineeringLeadership #Innovation #TechnologyHistory