Most company schwag talks about how great the company is and how it’s changing the world, but the schwag of one of the most consequential companies in AI is a little different.
Dutch semiconductor maker ASML, which makes the machines that manufacture nearly all chips in the world, was called “a relatively obscure Dutch company” in 2020 by the BBC. ASML, of course, was anything but obscure, and was critical to the entire technology industry — not only computers and AI datacenters, but even everyday gadgets like TVs and washing machines can’t function without its chip-making technology. But ASML took the remark in its stride. It has been giving out hoodies with the phrase “a relatively obscure Dutch company” emblazoned across them to its employees, who proudly display them on social media.
The grey hooded sweatshirts feature the ASML logo in bold blue, beneath which sit the BBC’s words in quotation marks with a clean attribution — “BBC News (2020).” New recruits in particular have wasted no time showing them off, with LinkedIn posts featuring the hoodie becoming something of a ritual for ASML new-joiners. It’s a way of signalling membership in a club that knows something the rest of the world is only recently catching up to.
The Company the World Couldn’t Afford to Ignore
The irony, of course, is that ASML was never truly obscure — not in any meaningful sense. The company, headquartered in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, is the sole manufacturer of the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines essential for fabricating the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Without ASML, there are no cutting-edge chips. Without cutting-edge chips, there is no modern AI. The supply chain that underpins nearly every advanced technology product on the planet runs, at a critical juncture, through a single company in the Dutch countryside.
What the BBC’s framing actually captured — perhaps unintentionally — was how poorly the broader public and media understood the semiconductor supply chain before the global chip shortage of 2021 and 2022 thrust it into mainstream consciousness. When factories idled for want of chips, when new cars sat unfinished in car parks, when PlayStation 5s became impossible to find, the world suddenly became very interested in where semiconductors come from. And the answer, inevitably, traced back through TSMC, Samsung, and Intel to the machines they use to print circuits — machines made only by ASML.
A Masterclass in Brand Self-Awareness
The hoodie campaign — if it can be called that — reflects something genuinely sophisticated about ASML’s corporate culture. Rather than quietly seethe at the mischaracterisation or issue a correction, the company leaned into the absurdity of it. The quote becomes funnier and more pointed the more you know about what ASML actually does. For engineers, physicists, and supply chain specialists who have spent careers understanding just how irreplaceable the company’s technology is, wearing the hoodie is a kind of private joke with a very high knowledge barrier to entry.
It also functions as effective, low-cost recruitment marketing. As new hires post their hoodie selfies and group shots on LinkedIn, the images circulate through precisely the networks — engineering graduates, semiconductor professionals, physics PhD students — that ASML most wants to reach. Each post is an implicit message: this is a company confident enough in its own significance to laugh at those who missed it.
ASML and the AI boom
The timing of the hoodie’s viral moment is not accidental. The AI boom has made ASML’s centrality to the technology stack impossible to ignore. Every Nvidia GPU used to train a large language model, every inference chip running in a data centre, every custom AI accelerator being designed by hyperscalers — all depend on semiconductor fabrication processes that require ASML’s machines. The company sits at the very base of the AI industrial pyramid, a fact that has driven its share price to heights that would have seemed fantastical when the BBC wrote its 2020 piece.
Governments have certainly noticed. ASML has found itself at the centre of geopolitical tensions over semiconductor access, with the United States pressuring the Netherlands to restrict exports of its most advanced machines to China — a policy the Dutch government has largely complied with. A company that can be made the instrument of great-power technology competition is, by any reasonable definition, not obscure.
The hoodie, in the end, is more than company merchandise. It is a small, wearable monument to the gap between how the world perceives technology and how technology actually works — and a reminder that the most consequential companies are often the ones you have never heard of, right up until the moment you cannot imagine the world without them.