The world’s most advanced chips, from the processor in an iPhone to the accelerators inside AI supercomputers, depend on machines so complex that only one company has ever mastered them. That company is ASML, in the Dutch town of Veldhoven. Without its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, the leading edge of computing would grind to a halt.
This is not marketing hyperbole. It is close to a literal description of how modern semiconductors get 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 per cent of the broader lithography market. Its biggest customers are the handful of firms that can deploy the technology at scale: TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Micron and SK hynix.
At the leading edge, the most critical layers of nearly every advanced chip are patterned on ASML’s EUV systems, and designs from the likes of Nvidia, Apple and AMD cannot be manufactured without them.
ASML does not make chips. It makes the machines that print them.
At the bleeding edge, there is no second supplier.
Why the machine is so hard to build
To understand the position, you have to understand the physics. Patterning the most critical layers of advanced chips requires nanometre-scale precision and light with an extremely short wavelength, and EUV light sits at 13.5 nanometres, far shorter than the deep ultraviolet light used in older tools.
Generating it is brutal. Inside the machine, around 50,000 times a second, microscopic droplets of molten tin are fired across 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 vaporises it into a plasma heated to roughly 220,000 degrees Celsius, around 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. That plasma emits the 13.5 nanometre light.
Because EUV light is absorbed by almost everything, including air and ordinary glass, it cannot be focused with lenses. The entire optical path runs through a vacuum and reflects off mirrors that rank among the smoothest objects ever manufactured, supplied by Zeiss in Germany. The laser comes from TRUMPF, and the light source traces back to Cymer, which ASML acquired. ASML’s real achievement was integrating all of it into a single machine that works, reliably, on a factory floor.
It is routinely called the most complex machine humanity has ever mass-produced, and that description is hard to argue with.
What you cannot do without it
EUV is not a luxury. It 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 through a technique called multi-patterning, which adds steps, cost and defects. A single EUV exposure can collapse several of those 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 handles many of the other layers on the same chip.
A machine that costs as much as a fleet of jets
None of this is cheap. A standard EUV system costs on the order of 200 million dollars, and the latest generation, High-NA EUV, runs to about 400 million dollars per machine, roughly double the price of the previous tools. The first High-NA systems are already in use at Intel and Samsung, and ASML has begun shipping its newest model, with SK hynix among the early recipients. High-volume manufacturing on High-NA is expected around 2027 to 2028.
The sums are staggering. ASML reported €32.7 billion in revenue 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 roughly 7.9 billion dollars for an estimated 30 EUV machines to be delivered by the end of 2027. ASML’s first quarter of 2026 brought in €8.8 billion in net sales.
From a leaky shed to one of Europe’s giants
The scale is easy to forget given where ASML started. Founded in 1984 and operating, in its early days, out of a leaky shed beside a Philips building, the company spent years close to failure before its tools found a market. By early 2026 it had overtaken SAP to become one of Europe’s most valuable technology companies, trading at around half a trillion dollars in market value.
The world’s most important single point of failure
A position this dominant, in a technology this critical, is also a geopolitical pressure point. EUV machines sit at the centre of the US-China chip standoff, and export controls have steadily restricted what ASML can sell and service in China. China, which at the 2024 peak accounted for nearly half of ASML’s revenue, has been guided down toward around 20 per cent for 2025 and 2026.
China is working hard to break the dependence. In December 2025, Reuters reported that engineers in Shenzhen, some of them former ASML staff, had built a reverse-engineered EUV prototype capable of generating EUV light, though not yet of producing working chips. Beijing’s stated target is around 2028, with many analysts putting a genuinely competitive system closer to 2030. ASML’s chief executive, Christophe Fouquet, has said China would need many years to catch up.
Whether that gap holds is one of the defining questions of the decade. For now, the most advanced computing on the planet, including the AI boom drawing in hundreds of billions of dollars, rests on machines built by one company, in one town, in the south of the Netherlands.
The leading edge of technology has an address, and it is in Veldhoven.
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