Elon Musk dialed into a closed-door ASML event this month, and the people on the other end were the engineers and executives who build the machines behind the world’s chips. CNBC reported the call, and ASML confirmed it. The occasion was the company’s annual technology conference.
What Musk told them is not known. The session was private.
His public view of the Dutch company is easier to find. Musk wrote that ASML “should be treasured and supported,” and called it “arguably the greatest company in Europe.”
The timing is hard to miss. SpaceX recently filed for an IPO that aims to raise $80 billion, a record. The company has also merged with Musk’s xAI, and it has struck a deal with Anthropic, the maker of Claude, to supply extra compute from its Colossus 1 data center. All of that runs on chips, and SpaceX will need as many as it can get to meet its own promises and demand.
ASML holds a rare position in that supply chain. It is the only maker of High NA, an advanced machine used to produce semiconductors. TSMC, Intel and Samsung all rely on ASML’s machine for their own widely used chips. SpaceX appears to want a place in that line.
