Pax Silica: Netherlands joins chip pact, defends ASML

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Thursday June twenty-fifth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: the Netherlands joins a US-led chip alliance and pushes back against Washington at the same time, Oracle blames AI for twenty-one thousand job cuts, SK Hynix files a record New York listing on the back of AI memory demand, the World Economic Forum says AI is moving out of the screen and into the power grid, and to close out, two things you can actually try this week: the open-source image editor GIMP and the privacy-first search engine Mojeek. Let's start in The Hague and Washington.

The Netherlands signs the US-led Pax Silica chip pact but refuses to let Washington dictate ASML's China business.

Samantha: The big geopolitical story today is the new chip alliance called Pax Silica, Latin for silicon peace. Dutch trade minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma signed the Netherlands into the pact in Washington on Tuesday. The alliance was set up by the Trump administration in December last year and now includes Australia, Japan, Israel, South Korea, and the Netherlands. The goal is to build a complete supply chain for AI chips that does not depend on Chinese raw materials. And the Netherlands is a key piece of that puzzle, because it is home to ASML, ASM International, and Besi, three companies the global chip industry simply cannot do without.

Bob: But there is a sharp twist. While the Dutch were signing in one room, in another room they were openly pushing back against a US bill called the MATCH Act. That proposal would force ASML to stop servicing its chip machines in China. If The Hague refuses, Washington wants to use the so-called foreign direct product rule, a US export rule that reaches into other countries, to force it anyway. The Dutch position, according to Sjoerdsma, is that this goes too far. The Netherlands wants to decide for itself what counts as a security risk, and ASML earns about a third of its revenue in China. Walking away from that is not a small ask.

Samantha: And the cabinet under prime minister Jetten is being noticeably less polite than previous Dutch governments. Back in 2022 the then economy minister called the American pressure a power play and largely went along with it. This time the line is different. Sjoerdsma told NRC that Dutch concerns and interests are so big that they are taking the unusual step of lobbying Congress directly. The MATCH Act is being pushed by anti-China hawks in both US parties, and backed by American memory chip makers like Micron who want to keep Chinese rivals away from the most advanced ASML machines.

Bob: There is a second piece that ties straight into this. The US has just told Anthropic that its most advanced AI models, internally referred to as Fable and Mythos, must be closed off to users with a foreign background. It is officially called an export restriction, even though nothing is actually being exported, the service runs on American servers. The bottom line for Europe is uncomfortable. The export war is no longer only about chips and machines, it is moving into AI models themselves, and the EU still has no unified export weapon of its own. Twenty-seven member states each set their own rules, which leaves countries like the Netherlands exposed to direct pressure from Washington and Beijing.

Oracle says AI has cost twenty-one thousand jobs in a single year, and more cuts may follow.

Samantha: Oracle has confirmed it laid off twenty-one thousand employees over the past year, almost thirteen percent of its workforce. The reason given in the company's own words is the adoption and deployment of AI across its operations. Headcount is now around one hundred and forty-one thousand, down from one hundred and sixty-two thousand a year ago. And Oracle is warning that more cuts could come. This is one of the clearest admissions yet from a major tech employer that AI is not just augmenting work, it is replacing it.

Bob: And it fits a wider pattern. Industry trackers count more than one hundred and twenty-three thousand tech job losses so far this year, with AI cited as the main driver in roughly eighty-seven thousand of them. For a long time the official story from tech leaders was that AI would mostly take over the boring parts and free people up for better work. Oracle is now saying out loud what many had only said in private. The bottom line is that we are watching the first wave of structural AI-driven job displacement inside the tech sector itself, the very industry that builds these tools.

Samantha: For European listeners this lands on two desks at once. Regulators in Brussels and in national capitals will be watching how multinationals justify these cuts under existing labour rules, especially the requirement to consult works councils. And European HR departments now have a benchmark. When an American giant says thirteen percent in a year, the question inside European boardrooms becomes: what is our number, and are we being honest about it? Expect more pressure for reskilling programmes and for transparency about which roles AI is actually replacing.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

SK Hynix prepares a twenty-nine billion dollar New York listing to ride the AI memory boom.

Bob: South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix is preparing one of the largest tech listings in recent memory. The company plans to raise around twenty-nine billion dollars on the NASDAQ exchange in New York, with trading expected to start around July tenth. To put that in perspective, this would be one of the biggest capital raises by an Asian tech company in years. The driver is straightforward: high-bandwidth memory, the specialised chips that sit next to AI processors and feed them data fast enough to keep up. Demand is far outstripping supply.

Samantha: And the strategic logic behind the listing is interesting. SK Hynix is already listed in Seoul, but a New York listing puts it directly in front of American institutional investors who currently pour their AI money into Micron and into Samsung. The company wants to close that valuation gap. It also gives SK Hynix a much deeper pool of capital to fund new factories, because the race to expand high-bandwidth memory capacity is essentially a race to spend money fast enough.

Bob: For Europe the consequences land on two fronts. First, prices. Memory shortages are already pushing up the cost of phones, laptops, and data centre equipment. Apple has signalled iPhone price rises and other manufacturers are quietly following. Second, supply. Some American tech firms are reportedly considering Chinese memory suppliers to get around the shortage, which sets up a familiar pattern. The risk, as analysts point out, is that China floods the market with state-subsidised memory chips the way it did with solar panels and batteries. European chip buyers would then face a choice between expensive Western supply and cheap but politically sensitive Chinese supply.

The World Economic Forum says AI is moving off the screen and into power grids, factories, and farms.

Samantha: The World Economic Forum, together with the publisher Frontiers, has released its Top Ten Emerging Technologies of 2026 report. The headline finding is a real shift. After years of software-first AI, basically chatbots and image generators on your phone, the biggest impact over the next five years is expected to come from what the report calls physical AI. That means AI built directly into power grids, into drug development pipelines, into food production, into robots that move around in the real world.

Bob: The examples cited are concrete. AI systems balancing electricity grids in real time as more solar and wind come online. AI accelerating drug discovery by predicting which molecules to test. AI controlling robots that work alongside humans in warehouses and on farms. The common thread is that the AI is no longer just answering questions on a screen, it is taking decisions that move physical things. That changes the risk profile, because when these systems fail, they fail in the real world, not just in your browser tab.

Samantha: For Europe this is significant for two reasons. The continent has strong industrial players in energy, in pharma, and in advanced manufacturing, sectors where physical AI is supposed to land. So there is genuine opportunity for companies like Siemens, ABB, Novo Nordisk, and the smaller specialist firms. At the same time, the EU AI Act already singles out AI in critical infrastructure as high-risk, with strict obligations on testing, documentation, and human oversight. The report effectively says: this is where AI is heading next, and Europe is one of the few regions with a rulebook already written for it. Whether that rulebook helps or hinders European competitiveness is the live debate in Brussels right now.

GIMP gives you a free, fully featured photo and image editor that does not need a subscription.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use this week. The first one is GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a free, open-source image editor that has been around for years but recently had a major overhaul. For anyone who looks at the monthly Adobe Photoshop bill and winces, this is the obvious alternative to try. It handles layers, masks, filters, retouching, batch processing, and pretty much everything a hobbyist or even a semi-professional needs.

Samantha: What makes GIMP interesting right now is that the recent version made it genuinely easier to use. Long-time users praised the technical power but admitted the interface was rough. That has been cleaned up. It runs on Windows, on Mac, and on Linux, and crucially it runs entirely on your own machine. No cloud upload, no account, no subscription. For European listeners that matters, because your photos and edits never leave your laptop, which sidesteps a lot of the data protection questions that come with cloud-based editors.

Bob: A practical note: if you have used Photoshop, the first hour with GIMP feels different because the menu structure is its own. Many users recommend installing a free add-on called PhotoGIMP, which rearranges the interface to look much more like Photoshop. After that the learning curve flattens out fast. Reviewers regularly point out that for most everyday tasks, sharpening, cropping, fixing colours, removing objects, there is genuinely no functional reason to pay a monthly fee. It is the kind of tool you install once and then forget you are not paying for.

Mojeek is the independent European search engine that does not track you and does not borrow Google's index.

Samantha: The second one is Mojeek, a search engine based in the United Kingdom. What sets it apart is that it builds its own index of the web, rather than reselling results from Google or Microsoft Bing like most so-called alternative search engines do. So when you search on Mojeek, you are getting genuinely different results, not a repackaged version of what the big players already show you. And it does not track you, no cookies, no profile, no advertising auction running in the background.

Bob: It is free to use, you just go to mojeek.com, and there is nothing to install. There is also a paid version for businesses and researchers who want to query the index at scale, but for normal use the regular site is enough. Mojeek is smaller than Google, so for very niche queries you may need to fall back on a bigger engine, but for everyday searches reviewers say it holds up well, and you genuinely see a different web. Independent journalists and privacy researchers in particular have been recommending it as a way to break out of the filter bubble.

Samantha: One European angle worth flagging: Mojeek is one of the few search engines run from inside Europe, with its servers and its team here. That puts it under European data protection law by default, not as a marketing claim but as a structural fact. For listeners who have been looking for a way to reduce their dependence on the big American platforms, this is a low-effort place to start. Change your default search engine in your browser and see how the next week feels.

Samantha: Today we covered: the Netherlands joining the Pax Silica chip alliance while fighting the US MATCH Act, Oracle blaming AI for twenty-one thousand job cuts, SK Hynix preparing a record New York listing on AI memory demand, the World Economic Forum's call that AI is moving into the physical world, and two things to try yourself: the free image editor GIMP and the independent European search engine Mojeek.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.