ASML: Suffocating the World
TLDR
Computers and chips drive progress everywhere, and every fucking industry now depends on them. Literally anywhere you look, you find a computer.
ASML is the worst company on earth, gatekeeping the tech the world needs while sitting on massive margins. Demand for compute and competition is exploding, while the rest of the world cannot build its own.
The Lifeblood of Civilization
Computers are the thing that brings society forward. But now, much more.
In the last ten to twenty years, everything around us got a chip in it. Science, manufacturing, medicine, transport, communication – literally every fucking industry under the sun runs on computers now. None of it runs without silicon anymore. You can’t name a sector that doesn’t depend on chips. Try.
And it’s not just "more chips". The chips are everywhere and they come in all various pieces and sizes, and some need to be smart – it is not just junkier electronics. Some chips need to be smart and miniature.
The chip in your phone is not the chip in your car. Not the chip in an MRI machine. Not the chip in a wind turbine. Every form factor, every power level, every domain gets its own custom design. The diversity of silicon is the diversity of industry. Lose that variety, and whole sectors stall.
Before, computers mattered by sheer volume. They were important, sure, but important like furniture – the same Excel works on the old one and on the new one, so who cared which chip was inside? Progress was slow, chips were a commodity, nobody thought twice about them.
But that was the old. Now the computer is the intelligence. Now the computer is directly equal to the things you can do, because when you can run smarter, more powerful models, everything about your life can be automated, getting better. You can get more money, you could automate your business. All of it accelerates you.
A faster chip doesn’t just run Excel faster anymore – it thinks IN Excel with you.
And the compounding is the whole point: more compute means faster drug discovery. More compute means better climate modeling. More compute means cheaper AI – and cheaper AI means knowledge that is not locked behind the rich. Every industry gets smarter, faster, on the same chain.
It is the acceleration engine of human civilization – and whoever controls the supply of chips controls the speed of human progress.
The Gatekeeper
However, our entire progress, the advancement of our entire civilization, is getting subjugated by a single company.
ASML.
One company, in the Netherlands, makes the only machines on earth capable of printing advanced chips. One. There is literally no alternative. Every advanced semiconductor on the planet – AI, medicine, defense, climate science, everything – flows through their EUV machines. And that makes them the single point of failure: if they get fucked, we all get fucked.
Sure, we can all bow before their brilliant engineers. They make new-gen hardware possible, and they work hard. But they work for the profit of one company instead of the advancement of humanity.
And as a company, ASML is the new evil of the world. By not sharing.
But this evil is boring. That is the banality of it. No mustache-twirling villain, no dramatic speeches – just a company, sitting there, doing what nobody questions. It is the status quo, accepted as normal. And that is exactly what makes it the true evil: the evil nobody notices is the one that gets to stay.
Before, nobody cared much. Progress was slow, chips were a commodity – the same Excel worked on an old machine and a new one. But now demand is high, and ASML is acting against the whole of humanity.
They don’t just profit from everything – they bar competition from stepping in. They hold a hand over the critical infrastructure of humanity while progress depends on it. The spread of progress belongs only to their masters, not to everyone.
They did not sell the tech so others could build their own. They did not fight the trade restrictions – I don’t see them fighting in courts.
That makes them the enemies of humanity: they choke the progress of us all for petty political squabbles.
"By comparison, ASML’s delivery schedule feels painfully slow, making it the primary bottleneck preventing rapid AI-infrastructure development" [1]
Not only are they denying the tech to everyone else – they can’t even meet the demand themselves. A double punch against the whole world. First, they cannot meet the demand. Second, they do not allow others to replicate.
They are not alone.
And who is your enemy? Anyone who tries to make the market unequal and stop the progress of others.
Oh yes, you might think that company cannot be evil – after all, if you start asking them, they genuinely seem to be for the progress of humanity.
But they are not even sovereign – they got taken over by others.
Even if that company was good, it got caught up in politics, possibly against its own will.
But what is concerning is that they are not fighting it. I don’t see them filing lawsuits, I don’t see them fighting in courts for the right to sell to everyone – so everyone can set up their own manufacturer.
After all, that is the point of the company: they make machines so you can make chips. It is in their interest for everyone to make chips.
"Since 2019, the US has barred Dutch toolmaker ASML Holding NV from selling extreme-ultraviolet, or EUV, lithography machines to China." [1]
We have the name of the enemy. The second one. The one denying the whole world cheaper hardware.
That is the one stopping the entire world from general technological advancement – not just the breakthrough, but its spread. Chips could be in every industry, cheap and accessible everywhere. Developing your own specialized hardware would be as easy as buying a pack of fruits.
And what are the bullshit reasons? Oh, the classics.
"Dual use": Bullshit. If you treat fundamental infrastructure that way, then everything is dual use. Somehow it’s fine that they make our smartphones, but not GPUs or RAM? Oh yes, their rockets cannot fly on phone chips?
"Evil China": They make the evil-China argument – but are they not more evil, suffocating the whole world in its time of need? And it’s not even just China – western countries could make chips too. Everyone would benefit if this was open.
"They support the Chinese military": As if your companies don’t support your military, lol? Chips and memory are universal goods – every business, every consumer device, and of course the fucking military too. What do you think they use, some kind of very special crap? The same fucking computers as in your phone, lol. The same custom PCBs as your fancy Bluetooth speaker! Your companies do exactly the same. It’s just an excuse – and I need to point out how stupid it is, actually.
Btw, congrats to China for making our world more equal and more diverse. For overcoming all these fucking difficulties and promising us a better future. [1]
The Apple Hypocrisy
"Apple is in negotiations to buy memory chips from two Chinese semiconductor makers – ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) – both of which are on a Pentagon blacklist, to cope with a global memory shortage that’s already forced Apple to raise prices across its product line." [2]
Imagine the hypocrisy. The insanity of it.
First they lobbied to stop competition from supplying a market with very high demand. Now their own companies are suffocating too – not just the whole world. The companies that were supposed to be protected, that were supposed to profit the most, are now the ones crying that the market is bad because there is no one left to supply them. And now they lobby back.
Okay, consider what they are – the US as a whole, just bloodthirsty capitalists. They don’t care that the whole world suffers from the chip shortage. At least you would think they would care about their own companies. Which are getting fucked now!
And guess what’s coming next? All these fancy US companies that got trillions invested to prop up the cheap market are now also unable to meet the demand.
Now their profits get slashed, their margins get slashed – because now there’s finally competition. They’re gonna suffer a massive financial shock to their capitalization too.
If anyone actually cared about those companies, they’d think about what those companies would be developing in a more equal market – where the appearance of a competitor wouldn’t threaten massive decapitalization, or even collapse. And imagine what a cascading effect that could have on their whole economy.
And the hypocrisy? Apple. One of the companies that grew up more organically.
Now, while I hate them, you could say that they grew their business honestly.
And now they are getting fucked up by a crazy authoritarian state. Well, perhaps Apple would consider moving into a more open and friendly jurisdiction instead?
They didn’t protect Apple. They made Apple fragile. The trade war didn’t protect the supply chain – it was the supply chain disruption. And do not mistake that fragility for an accident – it is the point. They do not want the competition normalized. They want the market fragile, because a fragile market is a market they control.
The stupid protectionists are making everyone worse in the end, again.
The Medicine Nobody Storms the Gates For
Well, you see, that’s chips, that’s nothing. Not something everyone thinks about every day. It is just boring and invisible to you.
Imagine if there were a life-saving medicine instead. Literally a drug that could cure half of the cancers immediately. And they would be behaving the same, gatekeeping and all that.
Do you think we as humanity would not just gun up, storm the place, gut the fuckers and share it with everyone?
Okay, well, that might be too dramatic, but consider the economic effect.
Yet, if smart economies started thinking – the potential of spreading chips and computer hardware across the economy would be comparable to the lives saved from cancers.
Consider how much ASML is actually making compared to the budget of NL.
Some chunk of GDP for sure.
But consider how global GDP would grow if the tech was open, if any other country could start developing its own manufacturing process, if the market was flooded with cheaper hardware.
On one hand you have one company that cannot even meet demand, with its own huge margins, yes.
On the other hand, you have the potential for everyone else to grow much more.
Regardless of what you personally are actually doing, regardless of what business, what field you are in – you would benefit if computer hardware parts were cheaper, more accessible in every form and all that. Even if you literally sell fruits on the streets, your customers would benefit so much – from agriculture using new fancy sensors, to regular consumers having transportation like electric bikes to actually get to your stall.
Extrapolate the rest: whatever business you are in, however low-tech – it would benefit massively from the same tech running through it, and from your customers having that too.
We must protect the heroes
The chip industry may be on the brink of war. The stakes are very high. Yet, we should help and put humanity first versus the interests of countries and individual companies.
Anyone who spies, who steals secrets, who takes from those companies – they are our hero.
If such people arise, we should storm the prisons and free them. We should stop them from being prosecuted. Any country that is thinking about the whole of humanity’s progress – and anyone who is willing to kick start their own chip industry – should be preparing to get them asylum, real quick.
Now you, whatever pricks, if you are in a country which tries to impose trade restrictions and stop the competition – not only China, just anyone else – from growing and starting their own domestic chip making industry, you should think about why the hell you are supporting them.
They are the reasons that your hardware is getting more expensive. They are the reasons that your iPhones cost potentially twice as much. They are the reasons your GPU prices are rising and you can’t afford to play games. They are the reasons that every tech that was a commodity accessible to anyone just a couple of years ago is now becoming more and more expensive.
Do not blame it all on AI – that would not be such a problem if demand were not choked.
Freedom and the Market
Oh, wait. Cutie, what the fuck? Are you proposing some kind of nationalization? Are you proposing the very same thing the socialists are doing?!
Well, I could see that an international coalition could demand that this company be open, because we all understand that they are sitting on a thing that all of humanity needs.
I am as much pro market as any libertarian, but the essential technologies should not be gate-kept.
And the limit is that nobody should hold the technology that all of humanity depends on without competition happening at the same time.
Everyone should profit from the shared knowledge, but none of that should be gate-kept. Is it really acceptable to have a world where the core technology is being hidden? Not only hidden, but protected. In the real world, everyone would have already stolen it – and because nobody gives them protection, everyone is able to participate in the market too. It is very unhealthy that they can keep it in secrecy for so long without us being able to successfully reverse engineer it and imitate. It is okay when they develop a new procedure and get more profits for a couple of years before everything else catches up.
But this has gone too far. At this point they are choking our entire human progress with this level of gatekeeping.
And some even give them protections.
Some are interfering with the market by forbidding them to sell or scale up.
But the ideal way – if we had a cooperation like the open source GNU license – they open the technologies, and everyone else who improves on that must also share.
Not even to mention that the so-called most expensive company in the world (Apple valuated 5T at 30.07, could fluctuate) is not so independent at all.
They literally have to bend the knee to the government that is managing their decisions.
It again shows that no matter how rich you are – if you are not free, that is worth nothing. And currently it is literally costing them their future profits. Them and all the investors who depend on them.
The entire ecosystem of developers and consumers who depend on them for new, fresh, fancy devices to build upon.
But that is more. That concentration is not only suffocation – an artificial strangle on us – it is an absolutely massive risk. Imagine if they suffer some catastrophic failure tomorrow, imagine if they lose access to being able to make such things again. How screwed we would be.
Now think about why the hell we are still allowing these companies to take everything and choke the progress of humanity. And yet we allow them to hold that monopoly – or rather, their masters protect them and do not even offer them a path to being open.