(Editor’s note: This edition of the Eindhoven Business Briefing is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and founders.)
For those of us growing up in America amid the personal computer revolution, one person defined that era – Steve Jobs. Jobs wasn’t much of an engineer or programmer. His gift was reading the zeitgeist, then translating it into products. Jobs was famous for saying that he didn’t give consumers what they wanted. He gave them what they wanted before they knew they wanted it.
Brilliant as he was, Jobs was a horrible human; narcissistic, mercurial and abusive.
But we overlooked all that because he gave us the Mac, iPods, iPads, iPhones and Apple stores. If we ever expected Jobs to be a “good person” who instinctively did the right thing – who acted for the greater good, not for shareholders – we were sadly mistaken. Doing the right thing often means losing money. As Oracle founder and fellow super rat Larry Ellison famously told Jobs, that high moral ground is expensive real estate.
In 2025, America is held hostage by a fascist cult around Donald Trump. If you think the current tech disruptors are going to do the right thing and use their wealth and tech to oppose Trump – the most corrupt and destructive president in American history – you’re high.
One by one, starting with Elon Musk, they’ve all bent a knee, pledging their undying love and support, simply hoping to avoid Trump’s erratic tariffs. It’s a long list of supplicants that includes the most powerful people in tech; Apple CEO Tim Cook, Ellison, Peter Thiel, a16z investor Marc Andreessen, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman. They decided to enable a would-be dictator in order to keep quarterly earnings up and stock prices high. Which is so Germany, 1933. Moral courage … what’s that? My guess is, sooner or later, we’ll all pay for their cynicism.
Europe is not exempt from this insanity. The Financieele Dagblad business publication had a post last week exposing an unnamed investor and venture builder in Eindhoven’s tech ecosystem. This is a guy who publicly promoted women in tech while sexually assaulting the very female founders in whom he invested, according to the post. The official response so far? Crickets. As far as we know, no legal charges have been filed. Which means we won’t name him.
To his credit, this disruptor willed Eindhoven’s startup ecosystem into being, then raised hundreds of millions to fund it. Yet, his actions (they’re not “alleged”; he confessed them to the FD) cast a pall over the entire ecosystem. Female engineers and entrepreneurs will never look the same way at the men in the ecosystem they thought were their male allies. They expected – and deserved – better.
If you think this smacks of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, it’s exactly the same. #MeToo began in 2006 to empower women to speak out and stop sexual abuse. Considering the amorphous nature of power dynamics, is that even realistic? The most successful people tend to believe that rules and standards of behavior don’t apply to them. There have to be some guardrails to keep the worst instincts of the disruptors in check because tech ecosystems are built on trust and integrity. If they’re not baked into the institution, we’ll all be pariahs.
That high moral ground is indeed expensive real estate. And by the way, this is not good news for the highly skilled internationals hoping to join a startup here. But the severity of fallout remains to be seen.
Fouquet: ASML is staying in Eindhoven.
Eindhoven got some good news in an interview with ASML CEO Cristoph Fouquet. Fouquet told the weekly Buitenhof current affairs program on NPO 2 that ASML will start building a new Eindhoven campus in 2026 where the company can grow for the next 10 years. “We intend to build a stronger ecosystem here,” he says in the interview above.
Which is the first time he’s stated unambiguously that ASML is staying. Other times, Fouquet has cited the Netherlands’ goal to reduce nitrogen pollution, which could curtail business, as a concern, as well as policies by the far-right to restrict immigration. Bringing in talent from all over the world is absolute condition for success, “and this has to continue,” he told Bloomberg.
ASML, which makes the most advanced photolithography machines necessary for next-gen chip production, is the most valuable tech company in Europe ranked by capitalization.
New photonics fab at High Tech Campus Eindhoven
You should start seeing the initial preparations to build a new, low-production photonics chip fab at High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Building 12 is slated for demolition this week to be replaced by a dedicated new facility. Photonics chips use light, of course, not electrons to shuttle around those ones and zeros, a faster, less power hungry technology than electronic circuits. The HTCE building used to house startups, most of which have relocated to HTC 27 and HTC 32. HTC 12 was one of the original Philips buildings and housed a particle accelerator. We know because we were at all the Drinks, Pitches and Demos events that were held in the particle accelerator room, which was the only sizable gathering space in what was a pretty humble building.
The replacement will be a testbed and fab for full-scale manufacturing of advanced Indium Phosphide (InP) photonic chips at a 6-inch wafer scale. An actual high-production fab, which would require at least 10 billion euros to build, is not on the planning boards as far as we know.
High Tech Campus Eindhoven will provide the building and cleanroom infrastructure while R&D institution TNO will actually develop the chip line with the goal of manufacturing 10,000 wafers per year. Which sounds like a lot, but is very limited production. By comparison TSMC produced about 17 million 12-inch wafers in 2024.
This is all happening under PIXEurope, a European program under the Chips Joint Undertaking (Chips JU). Its long-term goal is to establish the world’s first fully integrated, open-access pilot line for photonic chips in Europe. The Eindhoven pilot line is funded through the EU Chips Act, PhotonDelta, TNO and the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and Defence.
This will be a boon to the photonics companies already on campus, SMART Photonics and EFFECT Photonics.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
