The Beam of Veldhoven – On the Illusion of Power and the Gravity of Knowledge There is a single beam of light in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, that quietly holds the modern world together. It isn’t political, religious, or philosophical — it’s literal. A laser beam. It etches circuits onto wafers of silicon so precisely that a single human hair would look like a mountain beside them. And without that beam, nothing digital would exist: no smartphones, no artificial intelligence, no self-driving cars, no cloud. That beam belongs to ASML, the only company on Earth capable of building EUV lithography machines. These machines are the lungs of the chip industry — they breathe light into matter. Every advanced chip, whether made by TSMC in Taiwan or Samsung in South Korea, begins with an act of light from a small Dutch village. 🔹 The House of Cards Called Progress The Magnificent Seven — NVIDIA, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla — are celebrated as symbols of progress. But their entire existence rests on a single link: the ability of TSMC to keep producing chips. And TSMC, in turn, depends entirely on ASML’s light. If TSMC stops, the world stops. And if ASML breaks, the world goes dark. This is not an exaggeration; it’s a design flaw disguised as globalization. The West spent decades chasing efficiency and profit, outsourcing production to Asia while congratulating itself on being “innovative.” But when you outsource production, you also outsource knowledge — and, eventually, control. The United States didn’t lose chipmaking. It sold it. 🔹 The Illusion of Intellectual Property American companies still believe their power lies in intellectual property, the sacred vault of patents and design files. But every time TSMC manufactures a chip, it learns something that the original designer doesn’t know. How the material behaves. Where the tolerances lie. Which process steps produce fewer defects. Knowledge leaks — not through espionage, but through practice. The craftsman always surpasses the architect. So if one day TSMC decided, “We’re done producing for you,” no contract could stop it. You can sue a company, but not a country. And even if you could, you can’t litigate reality into existence. A chip that isn’t made simply doesn’t exist. 🔹 The Paradox of Power Washington knows this. That’s why it’s pouring billions into building new fabs in Arizona. But a factory is not a culture. You can import the machines, but not the mindset that runs them. You can copy the design, but not forty years of disciplined precision. The paradox is cruel: the only way to enforce control over your dependency is by destroying the very network that sustains you. An invasion of Taiwan, for instance, would vaporize the fabs the world depends on. A boycott would freeze the same companies that demand “sovereignty.” The producer now owns the master. The tool has outgrown the hand that forged it. 🔹 The Hidden Empire of Light It is poetic, really. For centuries, power was measured in territory, armies, and oil. Today, it’s measured in nanometers and wavelengths. Empires once fought over gold; now they compete for photons. And in the middle of it all stands ASML — a quiet Dutch company with no soldiers, no slogans, and no illusions of grandeur. Its light passes silently across the world, engraving the patterns of human ambition onto slivers of silicon. The beam of Veldhoven is both creation and dependence, both mastery and fragility. It is the light that powers the illusion of control. Perhaps that’s the lesson of our age: we’ve built a civilization on precision so delicate that one misaligned mirror could end it. And yet, we still believe we are in charge.