Could you help us untangle and understand these different perspectives?

You have many different versions of Moore's Law, and we all tend to pick the one we like the most.

And depending on the version, I think you will find out that the law is either dead or very much alive.

So I think there's two main versions of it.

The first one is the one that says that the cost of chips has to go down by a factor of two every two years.

That one is dead for many, many years because the cost of technology has been increasing already for a while.

The version I picked before is the version that said that the transistor density has to double every two years.

But I'd be interested to understand how you think about the long-term structural demand that you're seeing for compute and how you plan for that in the context of what has historically at least been a cyclical industry.

What do you think it is that gives you the cultural ability to make a pivot like that to a new way of doing something where there's so much sunk capital in the old way?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, we talk about company, you cannot not talk about culture.

And I think that you most probably noticed that in ASML, the belief that you have to deliver what your customer will need and you have to anticipate that is absolutely critical.

And over time, of course, that very strong belief has made our success and It came with some risk.

I think that, you know, you mentioned before that there was a point of time in industry where a lot of people thought EUV would not work.

I still remember a day of 2000, I think it was 2014, it was SPIE, and there was this nice article saying EUV is dead.

It was not about Moslow, it was about EUV.

I was just curious, how do you wrestle with being simultaneously an incredibly important commercial supplier to your customers, but also having this role as one of the most important strategic geopolitical assets in the world? How do you manage to plan the business when those geopolitical fault lines are moving and they're moving outside of your control very often?

What is your message to Brussels? What is it that Europe needs to do to ensure that it is not vulnerable to those kind of supply chain risks?

Well, I think indeed there's a lot of discussion around that, and sovereignty has become a key word because people realize that strategically, if you don't have a big enough part of a certain ecosystem, in this case AI, you're going to be exposed to the goodwill of other parties.

But I think what's very important to understand when it comes to sovereignty is to get sovereignty, you need innovation first.

You have to do things in the right order.

It's not enough to say, I want sovereignty.

What's very important is make sure that innovation can happen in Europe.

And I think that's a bit the idea of the tech creators group we have created, which where we believe that it is very, very important to have a dialogue with the different governments, commissions, but also national governments, to help them to understand how to create the conditions such that the AI ecosystem can develop in Europe.

Where else can Europe have skin in the game when it comes to AI? Well, I think...

In an exclusive interview recorded on November the 14th at ASML's headquarters, Fouquet explained why no other company on the planet can do what his can.

Lithography will always be there, right? Because you cannot do anything with lithography.

And there will always be the wish to get better lithography.

Better lithography means better resolution, better accuracy, and better productivity.

And we're going to work basically on those three axes for many, many years.

If we look at lithography and ISML today, thanks to EUV, we most probably know what to do for our customer for the next 10 to 15 years.

And the next 10 to 15 years, we'll still see major innovation in lithography in order to continue to work with our customer on cost and transistor density.

Why?