ASML is a Dutch company. It was founded in Eindhoven in 1984, it's headquartered in Eindhoven today, and its most important product — the extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, a device the size of a bus that uses light with a wavelength shorter than a strand of DNA to carve transistors into silicon — is assembled in Eindhoven. There is no more advanced piece of manufacturing equipment on earth. And ASML has a monopoly on it. Nobody else makes these machines. Nobody else is close.

This week, ASML announced it's hiring a thousand more people in Taiwan. Not in the Netherlands. Not in Germany or the US. Taiwan — where it already employs more than four and a half thousand people, runs two factories, is building a third, and generates nearly ten billion US dollars a year. A quarter of its entire global revenue. From one island.

That number — a quarter of global revenue from one island — is exactly what we're looking at this week.