Europe Supplies the Tools

I. The Last Thinking Core

In May 2026 the French company SiPearl powered up its Rhea1 processor for the first time — the first standalone high-performance processor Europe has developed in decades. At the press conference in Paris, the chairman of the board said a sentence that reveals more about the continent than any sovereignty declaration: the last standalone processor designed in Europe was the Sinclair ZX, perhaps the Commodore 64 — designed over forty years ago.

Let that stand for a moment. Through the entire age of the personal computer, of the internet, of the smartphone, right up to the threshold of artificial intelligence, this continent has not produced a thinking core of its own for computers. And it is not the line of a sneering outsider — it comes from the man building the new processor. An admission from within.

What is remarkable is not that Europe can do nothing. It is that the one thing it can no longer do — compute for itself — sits beside the one thing it commands like no one else: building the tools with which everyone else computes.

II. What Europe Can Do

For this Europe can do, and at the very top. The Dutch company ASML is the only maker of EUV lithography in the world — no leading-edge chip, no AI accelerator, no top-end processor comes into being without its machines. Behind it a whole row of European indispensabilities: the precision optics of Zeiss, without which the EUV light cannot be focused; the wafers of Siltronic, the substrates of Soitec; the power semiconductors of Infineon and STMicroelectronics that sit in every car and every industrial plant. In the machines for chip production, the EU holds nearly forty percent of the world market.

Europe is, in a word, the world's toolmaker. It builds the hammers everyone needs. That is no small position — it is the rarest and most powerful one in this industry. And yet it is not what it is taken to be.

III. What Europe Does Not Hold

For even the crown jewel does not belong to Europe entirely. The basic research into EUV lithography was carried out in the 1990s at three American national laboratories and disseminated through a consortium called the EUV LLC, which included Intel and other US firms. ASML joined it to draw on that research — and committed in return to establishing a research centre in the United States and to sourcing a large share of the components for machines sold in America from US suppliers. Because the whole effort was funded with American public money, the US Congress must approve the licensing to this day. And the heart of the system, the light source that generates the EUV light at all, ASML bought in San Diego in 2012 and runs to this day as an American division.

From which follows the decisive thing: Washington has a de facto veto. Because American technology sits in every machine, US law reaches inside it. When China wanted to buy the most advanced ASML systems, the export was blocked in 2019 — under American pressure, formally through a Dutch decision. Since then ASML may not ship its EUV machines to China; later came restrictions on advanced equipment and even on servicing it. The greatest lever Europe possesses, it may not pull without American assent.

The smith builds the best hammer in the world — and another decides to whom he may sell it. Even Europe's strength is a borrowed one.

IV. The Boomerang

What does such a blockade bring about? Probably the opposite of what it intends. Cut off from the most advanced machines, China did two things. First, it made do with the older, still-permitted tools: through elaborate multiple patterning, the SMIC group today produces chips of the seven-nanometre class — more expensive, with poorer yield, but good enough for domestic needs. A Chinese AI model with 744 billion parameters was trained entirely on such chips in 2025. The blockade has made things dearer and slower, but it has not prevented them.

Second — and this weighs more heavily — it has driven China into a race it might never have taken up with such seriousness without it: building an EUV machine of its own. Under the code name „Mount Everest," led by Huawei and funded by the state like a Manhattan Project, a consortium is pursuing a different technical path than ASML. At the end of 2025 a working prototype was reported; mass production is aimed at the end of the decade. Observers already speak of a structural break — the beginning of the end of the Western monopoly.

And here the circle of this essay closes in a bitter way. ASML's monopoly is Europe's only real chokepoint, its only lever. But the policy that pulls this lever is decided in Washington — and it is precisely the thing most likely to destroy it. China was at times half of ASML's business; now it races to replace ASML entirely. Europe bears the cost twice over: the lost market today and, should China succeed, the lost monopoly tomorrow — for a conflict it did not declare. The one tool that makes Europe indispensable is being fired off as another's ammunition. And on the day China builds its own machine, Europe's only lever is gone.

V. Ricardo, Learned Too Well

How did Europe come into this position? The convenient answer is that Europeans lack strategic thinking. But that is wrong and too cheap. Whoever builds a world monopoly like ASML over decades thinks strategically indeed. The problem is not mental laziness but something deeper: Europe internalised an economic doctrine so thoroughly that it became a worldview.

The doctrine is that of comparative advantage — let each do what it does best, and exchange will make all richer. It is beautiful and at its core correct, but it has a built-in blind spot: it knows efficiency, not vulnerability. It says how the cake grows largest, not what happens when the one from whom you buy your bread switches off the oven. Europe internalised the first part and held the second to be overcome.

The others signed the same doctrine officially — and always kept back doors open. The United States through export law and national laboratories, China through subsidies and forced technology transfer; both under the banner of free trade. For Washington and Beijing, trade remained an instrument. In Europe it became a creed — and a creed cannot be suspended as the situation demands.

The word for this is forgetfulness of history. „Now everything is different" — that is the sentence after 1989: the end of history, change through trade, interdependence as a guarantee of peace. Europe built an identity out of it, and that was honourable, for it had drawn the lesson of its own catastrophes: autarky and great-power thinking had destroyed the continent twice. Interdependence was not only economics but morality. Yet whoever declares dependency a virtue can no longer read it as a danger. When the world turned to power politics again, the others stood ready with their back doors — and Europe with a principle.

VI. The One Brain

And yet there is a counter-attempt, and it is the most hopeful Europe has to offer. In 2023 three researchers left DeepMind and Meta and founded Mistral AI in Paris — the most serious attempt since the Commodore 64 to build a brain rather than a tool, this time in the form of a language model meant to rival the American ones. Within three years Mistral became the continent's most valuable AI company.

The finest thing about this story is who funds the brain: the toolmaker himself. In September 2025 ASML led the 1.7-billion-euro financing round, bought in with 1.3 billion, and became Mistral's largest shareholder. The one who builds the machines with which the world makes its chips reaches for the one who is to bring thinking back to Europe. For a moment it looks as though the continent had found the missing half of itself.

But here the old figure returns. On what does this European brain compute? On American silicon. Mistral's new data centre south of Paris runs on 13,800 Nvidia graphics processors — manufactured, like all of them, at TSMC in Taiwan, with ASML's machines. Mistral's founder says the right sentence himself: there can be no AI sovereignty if all the compute runs on American infrastructure. And builds his data centre with American chips. More telling still: Mistral is now exploring designing its own chips to escape the dependence on Nvidia — chasing the very independence this essay is about.

Mistral is therefore no counter-proof but the confirmation one storey up. Europe is at last building a brain again — but it thinks on borrowed silicon. The dependency has not vanished; it has merely moved up a layer. And it remains small: Mistral is valued at barely twelve billion, the largest American rivals at more than twenty times that. „We are still a few orders of magnitude behind the US players," says the founder. That is honest — and it is the whole situation in a single admission.

VII. The Toolmaker of the Megamachine

To internalise Ricardo means, at bottom, to make oneself voluntarily the specialised organ of a system whose controls lie elsewhere. Europe made itself the best toolmaker of the Megamachine and took that for freedom, because the exchange, after all, benefits everyone. The others knew that in such a system the question is never who produces most efficiently, but who can turn off whose tap.

The Commodore 64 was the last time Europe built a brain by its own power. Mistral is the attempt to take up that thread again — the first serious one in forty years — and that ASML of all companies funds it is the most hopeful sign in this whole story: the toolmaker reaching for thought. But this brain still computes on foreign silicon, is still many times smaller than what it sets out against, and the one lever Europe holds threatens to crumble even as Washington pulls it. Europe did not unlearn its own computing from incapacity, but from a reason that no longer thought a watchman necessary — and only now, laboriously, begins to remember.

Sovereignty there has no opening ceremony. It would begin on the day the circle closed: when the toolmaker also built the brain and the brain computed on its own chips. Until then the sentence holds that captures the whole situation in a single line: Europe supplies the tools and lets others compute with them.