Christophe Fouquet

Christophe Fouquet is the President and CEO of ASML Holding, the Dutch semiconductor equipment company that manufactures the lithography systems used to produce virtually every advanced microchip in the world. Born in France, Fouquet holds a physics degree and joined ASML in 2008, rising through the company's EUV and DUV (deep ultraviolet) business lines. He served as president of ASML's EUV business and later led the company's applications and holistic lithography group before being appointed CEO in April 2024, succeeding Peter Wennink, who led the company through its transformative EUV commercialization era. ASML's position in the semiconductor industry is unique: the company holds an absolute monopoly on EUV lithography systems — the machines required to manufacture chips at the most advanced process nodes (below 7nm). Each EUV system costs approximately $380 million, weighs 180 tons, requires multiple jumbo jet loads to ship, and draws on a supply chain of over 5,000 vendors. No other company on Earth has successfully developed a competing EUV system, making ASML the single chokepoint through which all leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing must pass. This monopoly position means ASML's customer list is a who's who of advanced chipmaking: TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and SK Hynix. Every cutting-edge processor from Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm is manufactured on ASML's machines. The company's newest High-NA (numerical aperture) EUV systems, which enable even finer patterning for next-generation chips, cost over $350 million each and represent the technological frontier of semiconductor manufacturing. Fouquet takes leadership during a period of intense geopolitical attention on ASML. US-led export controls restricting China's access to advanced lithography equipment have made ASML a focal point of the US-China tech war. The Dutch government has implemented export restrictions that prevent ASML from shipping its most advanced EUV systems to Chinese chipmakers, directly impacting the company's addressable market while reinforcing its strategic importance to Western semiconductor sovereignty.