Dutch chipmaking boom: turnover hits €46B, jobs nearly double

The Netherlands' semiconductor industry generated €46 billion in turnover in 2025, more than double the €21 billion it recorded in 2019, according to new provisional figures released by Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Employment in the sector followed a similar trajectory, nearly doubling from 23,000 workers to roughly 43,000 over the same six-year span.

The figures, drawn from a new dataset covering more than 300 firms, mark the first time CBS has combined its own business data with records from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) to estimate how much of a company's activity is tied specifically to semiconductors. CBS describes the methodology as still under development, meaning all the numbers in the release should be treated as provisional estimates rather than final statistics.

An exponential growth

According to CBS, turnover climbed steadily every year of the period under review: from €21.3 billion in 2019 to €33.6 billion in 2022, and on to €45.6 billion by 2025 — an average annual growth rate of about 14%. That amounts to roughly €24 billion in additional turnover over six years.

The statistics agency attributes the surge to two overlapping trends. First, the firms already active in the sector expanded overall. Second, and more distinctively, companies have increasingly concentrated their business specifically on semiconductor-related activity: the share of turnover tied to chips within these firms rose from 46 percent in 2019 to 51 percent in 2025. New entrants to the sector played only a modest role by comparison, contributing an estimated €400 million of the total growth.

Employment tells much the same story. The workforce grew from 23,200 to 43,200 over the period, an increase CBS says was driven both by broader hiring at existing firms and by a similar reallocation of staff toward semiconductor work. Newly founded companies accounted for roughly 2,000 of the new jobs.

The Dutch chip ecosystem has a key position

The Netherlands has become one of Europe's most closely watched chip hubs largely on the strength of its equipment and materials suppliers rather than chip production itself. Veldhoven-based ASML, the world's dominant maker of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to etch the most advanced chips, anchors an ecosystem that also includes materials and deposition specialist ASM International and chipmaker NXP Semiconductors, along with a dense layer of smaller suppliers, toolmakers and research spin-offs clustered around Eindhoven's high-tech corridor.

CBS's report does not attempt to explain the drivers of demand, but the timing coincides with a global surge in investment in AI infrastructure, which has pushed up demand for the advanced chips — and the specialized manufacturing equipment behind them — that underpin data centers and AI hardware worldwide. That dynamic has put Dutch equipment makers, whose machines are a bottleneck step in producing the world's most advanced processors, in an increasingly strategic position amid broader European and American efforts to secure semiconductor supply chains.

CBS says it will continue refining its measurement approach as more data becomes available, meaning the 2025 figures could still be revised in future releases.