Europe’s top tech boss warns Brussels is driving AI companies away
VELDHOVEN, The Netherlands — The well-lit meeting room where Christophe Fouquet receives visitors contains a small shrine of gifts, corporate relics left behind by government representatives and executives who make the pilgrimage to this small Dutch town to see the head of Europe’s most valuable tech firm.
They come because his company, ASML, makes the machines behind the world’s most advanced chips. And Fouquet wants to send a message to Brussels: Europe is doing a bad job on artificial intelligence and risks losing companies to other regions.
As a provider of the machines that print the chips powering smartphones, cars, data centers and the AI systems reshaping the global economy, ASML sits at the center of the tech world. It is Europe’s biggest tech company in terms of market capitalization, valued at €515 billion with more than 44,000 employees.
Fouquet is a figure to whom senior government officials and tech executives open their doors. Last month he met U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and he recently spoke with Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Asked if he has European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s phone number, he chuckled and said they “talked recently.”
And yet, Fouquet’s comments — delivered in an exclusive interview with POLITICO in his company’s offices, where construction cranes are busy with yet another expansion — expose a deepening rift between Brussels and Europe’s industrial champions. The EU wants to regulate and subsidize its way to AI relevance, but ASML’s boss says the bloc is creating obstacles for companies before it has created the demand for AI applications that would make Europe competitive.
That weakness is visible in ASML’s own books: 99 percent of the company’s machine sales come from outside Europe, Fouquet said, a striking figure for a company based in the Netherlands and central to the global AI supply chain.
He pointed in particular to the EU’s AI Act — the bloc’s landmark rulebook for the technology — as an example of Brussels setting boundaries before European companies had built strong AI products of their own.
“We didn’t start running, we didn’t start even walking, and we already had in front of us all the obstacles to not be able to make even the first step,” Fouquet added, arguing that this was “not serving the industry.”
The criticism lands after months of pressure from Europe’s largest companies to soften the AI Act. In early May, ASML joined Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral, Nokia, SAP and Siemens in warning von der Leyen that the legislation risks hobbling European companies before they can compete with U.S. and Chinese rivals.
EU policymakers have already moved to delay part of the law and carve out a potentially lighter regime for industrial AI applications as part of a simplification package adopted earlier this month.
Fouquet welcomed that shift, but argued that the same logic should apply beyond machinery and industrial uses, warning that Europe’s companies would take AI development elsewhere if the bloc’s rules remained too restrictive.
“If they cannot do it here, they will do it elsewhere,” he said.
Fouquet dismissed the European Commission’s push to simplify its regulations through what are known in Brussels jargon as omnibus packages. “The idea that you make something very complex, then simplify it, and that you end up with something good … is a bit strange,” he said.
Instead, he argued, Brussels should write rules with the companies expected to compete under them.
Fouquet’s comments are a shot across the bow as the Commission prepares to present a tech sovereignty package next month, aimed at reducing reliance on U.S. technology, boosting the bloc’s data center capacity and growing its share in the chips supply chain.
He warned against overemphasizing local production, saying that “no country will ever have it all,” and cautioned against a provision that would require governments to give preference to European companies in public procurement.
“To have preference, you first have to have something you can prefer,” he said.
He also warned against Europe spending heavily on data centers or chip factories without creating the demand for AI applications, cloud services and chips.
“The idea that the Commission, or the EU, will build a [factory] or a data center is maybe not the best one,” he said. “You should leave that to industrial champions because they know how to do it.”
In 2022, as part of the EU’s landmark chip strategy, then Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton pushed for the construction of a factory for advanced chips on European soil. But an effort by the U.S. chipmaker Intel to build such a plant in Germany collapsed in 2024, due to financial troubles at the company.
The problem, Fouquet said, is that no one in Europe uses such advanced technology.
“If you had a fab like this in Europe, all the wafers that would be manufactured would be exported to the United States,” he added. So then you’ll be in a situation where Europe subsidizes a big project and the output of this project goes somewhere else.”
The Commission, he said, should instead focus on creating the conditions that would drive demand for AI services — allowing the industry to respond with the technological infrastructure needed to supply it.
In response to Fouquet’s criticism of the bloc’s AI law, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said that “the AI Act supports innovation by increasing trust, and trust leads to increased uptake and investments.”
He added that the recent deal on the AI simplification package brings “clear timelines [and] simpler and innovation-friendly rules for AI.”
