A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton

Christophe Fouquet runs the company that builds the only machines able to print the most advanced AI chips, and when I asked how he handles the pressure, he told me he mostly does not feel it.

I sat down with the ASML CEO in the Netherlands for A Bit Personal, and our conversation kept coming back to a few plain ideas: stay curious, take real risks, tell each other the truth, and go home at night. Here is what stayed with me, followed by some reading if you want to go further.

If you’re curious about the process of building these chips, I like this video from CNBC that takes you through exactly how it works.

This episode is proudly sponsored by J.P. Morgan and Keyser

A spaceship behind glass

Eighteen years ago, Christophe was working in the US semiconductor industry and took a tour of a research center in Albany, New York. A window runs along the clean room there, and as he walked past rows of tools that all looked like big boxes, he stopped at one enormous machine with cables everywhere. It looked like a spaceship. His host told him it was the first ASML EUV prototype. He sent his résumé to ASML the next day.

What he saw in that machine was risk. Someone, he told me, had clearly taken a big bet to make it work, and the bet took another 20 years to pay off. For much of that time EUV nearly bankrupted the company, because ASML kept putting its profits into the tool. Christophe credits the people who stayed with it for 10 or 20 years until it worked.

From being good to being useful

For the first part of a career, Christophe said, you prove yourself through expertise, and school trains you for it by rewarding the person who is first in the class. Then you hit a ceiling, because the only variable is you. In his mid to late 30s he started spending his energy on sharing methods and ideas instead of defending ownership of them, and he got comfortable when an idea he started became the group’s idea. Looking back, he said, he felt he had wasted some time before that. For him, that shift is the moment you become a leader and not just a manager.

It is also why he calls the CEO the least important person in a company. One person has a fixed amount of bandwidth, and the job is to build a team that multiplies it by 10 or 100.

Ego, truth and failure

When I asked how he separates conviction from ego, Christophe pointed to data. An engineer can believe a design is the best thing humankind ever thought of, then test it, and the result says whether that is true. If you keep going after the data says you are wrong, that is ego, stubbornness or arrogance, and you will fail. He called success the biggest threat of all, because it can convince you that you are very smart and make you forget it came from hard work, mistakes and risk.

The same thinking shaped how ASML is built. The company chose to be a system integrator, working with the best partner for each critical component, Zeiss for the optics among them, instead of trying to do everything itself. The idea that you can be the very best at everything, he said, is pretty close to ego. It also shapes who he keeps around: people who tell him the truth, because flatterers are useless.

On failure, he allows himself the disappointment, since it is part of the learning, and then treats the problem as something left to invent. In some ways, he told me, failure can be more fun than success.

Doing everything twice

We also talked about what it would mean to split the US and Chinese chip ecosystems. His point is a practical one: you would have to do the work twice. The R&D for a new ASML machine, for the next generation of chips at TSMC, Intel or Samsung, and for NVIDIA’s AI products would all be duplicated. He added that restrictions give the strongest possible incentive for someone to build an alternative, which can leave a country with a complete, independent and very expensive ecosystem.

He is also skeptical that EUV can be copied quickly. It took ASML and its partners about 30 years, and a report he received the week we spoke said ASML systems around the world have now exposed one billion wafers. That is a body of learning feeding the next machine, and he said those trying to catch up have nowhere near it.

Leaving ASML at the front door

Christophe grew up in Grenoble in a modest family and was the first in it to finish high school and go to university. His parents measured success by happiness, he told me. The question at home was whether he was happy with his results, never whether he was first or second or third in the class. He took his first flight at 25, signed his first job offer at Applied Materials without knowing much about the company (it had offices in Israel and the United States, which sounded good), and has since worked in Israel, the US and the Netherlands.

Today he has six children, the oldest 27 and the youngest 3, and he lives in a small village in the countryside near ASML. A Sunday morning for him means a slow start, some time in the garden, a trip to the bakery for bread and croissants, and breakfast with the family. He does not keep a morning routine. What he keeps is a boundary: when he crosses the door of his home, he stops thinking about ASML, and he says that empty space in his mind is what makes room for new ideas the next day. He takes two weeks of holiday every summer for the same reason, and American colleagues still ask him why.

Try this week

Christophe’s rule for staying honest is to surround yourself with people who tell you the truth. This week, ask the person most likely to do that where you are wrong about something you care about, and listen to the answer without defending yourself.

Keep reading

* Chip War by Chris Miller. I reread parts of it before the interview, and the chapter called “No Plan B” covers the EUV bet Christophe and I talked about.

* How ASML Got EUV by Brian Potter. American institutions funded much of the early EUV research, yet ASML ended up the only company to bring it to market. Potter explains why having a working technology and winning in the marketplace are two different problems.

* The Costs of U.S.-China Semiconductor Decoupling from CSIS. A look at what it takes to separate the two ecosystems, which pairs with Christophe’s point about doing the work twice.

* Europe’s irreplaceable innovator: ASML’s CEO on powering the digital future. A November 2025 interview with Christophe by IMD professor Jean-François Manzoni, for a more traditional business view of the same leader.

Listen

The full conversation with Christophe Fouquet is on A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton, anywhere you get your podcasts.

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