The world’s most advanced chips, from an iPhone’s processor to the accelerators of AI supercomputers, depend on machines so complex that only one company has ever mastered them. This company is ASML, located in the Dutch town of Veldhoven. Without its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, edge computing would be paralyzed.
This is not marketing hyperbole. This comes close to a literal description of how modern semiconductors are made.
One company, one machine
ASML is the only company selling production-ready EUV lithography systems to the semiconductor industry. It controls the entire commercial EUV market and, by some estimates, more than 80% of the broader lithography market. Its biggest customers are the handful of companies capable of deploying the technology at scale: TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Micron and SK hynix.
At the cutting edge, the most critical layers of almost every advanced chip are modeled after ASML’s EUV systems, and designs from the likes of Nvidia, Apple, and AMD cannot be manufactured without them.
ASML does not manufacture chips. It manufactures the machines that print them.
At the forefront of technology, there is no second supplier.
Why the machine is so difficult to build
To understand ASML’s pivotal position, you have to understand physics. Modeling the most critical layers of advanced chips requires nanoscale precision and extremely short wavelength light, and EUV light is at 13.5 nanometers, much shorter than the deep ultraviolet light used in older tools.
The Physics Behind EUV
Generating EUV light is a complex process. Inside the machine, about 50,000 times per second, microscopic droplets of molten tin are projected through a vacuum chamber and struck by a high-power carbon dioxide laser. As Zeiss describes the process, each droplet is hit twice: a first pulse flattens it and a second vaporizes it into a plasma heated to about 220,000 degrees Celsius, or about 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This plasma emits light of 13.5 nanometers.
The Role of Collaborators
Since EUV light is absorbed by almost everything, including air and ordinary glass, it cannot be focused with lenses. The entire optical path passes through the void and is reflected on mirrors that are among the smoothest objects ever made, supplied by Zeiss in Germany. The laser comes from TRUMPF and the light source goes back to Cymer, acquired by ASML. ASML’s real achievement has been integrating all of this into a single machine that operates reliably in a factory.
It is commonly considered to be the most complex machine that humanity has ever mass-produced, and this description is difficult to dispute.
What you can’t do without
EUV is not a luxury. This is what makes the most advanced nodes economically viable.
With older deep ultraviolet tools, printing the finest patterns means exposing a wafer over and over again through a technique called multi-patterning, which adds steps, costs and defects. A single EUV exposure can combine several of these cycles into one. For high-volume 5nm, 3nm, and 2nm-class chips, EUV has become the practical route for the most critical layers, even though DUV still manages many other layers on the same chip.
A machine that costs as much as a fleet of planes
None of this is cheap. A standard EUV system costs on the order of $200 million, and the latest generation, High-NA EUV, costs about $400 million per machine, about double the price of previous tools. The first High-NA systems are already in use at Intel and Samsung, and ASML has started shipping its new model, SK hynix among the first recipients. High-volume manufacturing on High-NA is expected between 2027 and 2028.
The amounts are staggering. ASML reported revenue of €32.7 billion for 2025 and ended the year with an order backlog of €38.8 billion, having shipped 48 EUV systems during the year. In a single recent order, SK hynix committed approximately $7.9 billion for approximately 30 EUV machines to be delivered by the end of 2027. ASML’s first quarter 2026 generated net revenue of €8.8 billion.
From a leaky hangar to one of the European giants
The scale is easy to forget given the origin of ASML. Founded in 1984 and operating, in its early days, out of a leaky hangar next to a Philips building, the company spent years on the brink of failure before its tools found a market. By early 2026, it had overtaken SAP to become one of the most valuable technology companies in Europe, with a market value of around $500 billion.
The world’s largest point of failure
Such a dominant position, in such a critical technology, also constitutes a geopolitical pressure point. EUV machines are at the center of the conflict between the United States and China, and export controls have gradually restricted what ASML can sell and service in China. China, which at the 2024 peak accounted for almost half of ASML’s revenue, has been tipped to decline to around 20% for 2025 and 2026.
China is working hard to break this dependence. In December 2025, Reuters reported that Shenzhen engineers, some of whom were former ASML employees, had reverse-engineered an EUV prototype capable of generating EUV light, but not yet producing working chips. Beijing’s stated goal is around 2028, and many analysts believe a truly competitive system will come closer to 2030. ASML Chief Executive Christophe Fouquet said China would need many years to catch up.
Whether this gap persists is one of the defining questions of the decade. For now, the most advanced computing on the planet, including the hundreds of billions of dollars AI boom, relies on machines built by a single company, in a single city in the south of the Netherlands.
The cutting edge of technology has an address: in Veldhoven.
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