Does ASML's investment portend a pivot to specialized, on-prem, enterprise models? No need to be the frontier general knowledge or even coding model, but instead an EU-based AI creator for things like chip design, pharma, automotive, etc?

Not even just for on-premise deployments, even for cloud settings. Google has demonstrated that you can profit very much from having your own specialized AI chips to bring down cloud costs. Maybe the EU with all the talks about giga AI factories is also planning to go in that direction instead of continuing to rely on overpriced NVIDIA chips.

Given current leaderships; it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where access to leading AI models from the US or China could be cut-off, restricted or otherwise compromised.

ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China.

In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.