ASML Holding

Based on Wikipedia: ASML Holding

The Machine That Makes the Modern World Possible

Somewhere in the southern Netherlands, in a town called Veldhoven that most people have never heard of, sits the most important factory on Earth. It doesn't make cars or planes or weapons. It makes the machines that make everything else possible.

ASML—originally Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography, though the company now insists the letters don't stand for anything—holds what amounts to a global monopoly on the most critical technology of our age. If you're reading this on a smartphone, laptop, or any modern electronic device, the chips inside were almost certainly made using ASML's machines. As of 2025, the company controls 83 percent of the worldwide market for lithography equipment.

That's not a typo. Eighty-three percent.

What These Machines Actually Do

To understand why ASML matters, you need to understand what photolithography is. Think of it as the world's most precise printing press.

A silicon wafer—the raw material for computer chips—gets coated with a light-sensitive chemical called photoresist. Then, ASML's machine shines extremely precise light through a mask containing a circuit pattern. Where the light hits the photoresist, a chemical reaction occurs. The exposed areas get washed away, leaving behind the pattern. This process repeats dozens of times on a single wafer, building up the intricate layers that form a modern microprocessor.

The challenge is scale. The features on today's most advanced chips are measured in nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. To put that in perspective, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines can etch patterns as small as 8 nanometers—one ten-thousandth the width of that hair.

This is like standing in New York and using a laser pointer to draw detailed portraits on individual grains of sand in Los Angeles. And doing it reliably, millions of times, without making mistakes.

The Physics of Impossibility

The key to making smaller chips is using light with shorter wavelengths. It's the same principle as trying to write with a thick marker versus a fine-point pen—you can't draw details smaller than your tool allows.

For decades, the industry used deep ultraviolet light at 193 nanometers wavelength. Engineers squeezed every last bit of capability from this approach, eventually immersing the lens in water to bend the physics slightly in their favor. A Taiwanese-American engineer named Burn-Jeng Lin proposed this idea of immersion lithography back in the 1970s, and ASML partnered with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to commercialize it in 2004.

But physics has limits. To go smaller, the industry needed extreme ultraviolet light—at just 13.5 nanometers wavelength. This is where things get genuinely wild.

You can't just build a conventional light source for extreme ultraviolet. Normal materials absorb this wavelength. You can't use glass lenses because the light won't pass through. The whole system has to work in a near-perfect vacuum.

Here's how ASML solved it: A high-powered laser hits tiny droplets of molten tin, traveling at about 70 meters per second, with such precision that each droplet explodes into plasma. This plasma emits extreme ultraviolet light. The light then bounces off a series of the most perfect mirrors ever made—manufactured by the German company Carl Zeiss—before finally reaching the silicon wafer.

Each tin droplet is about 25 micrometers across. The laser hits 50,000 of them per second. If this sounds like science fiction, that's because until recently, it was.

A Machine the Size of a Bus, Delivered by Jumbo Jets

ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines are not subtle devices. Each one weighs 180 metric tons. Shipping requires three Boeing 747 cargo planes. Assembly at the customer's factory takes months.

The price tag matches the scale. The TWINSCAN NXE:3600D—ASML's best-selling extreme ultraviolet system—costs up to $200 million per unit. The next generation, called High-NA (for high numerical aperture, a measure of how much light the optics can gather), runs approximately $370 million each. These are the most expensive machines ever built for manufacturing.

For context, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner costs about $250 million. ASML's customers are essentially buying equipment more expensive than commercial aircraft, and they're buying dozens of them.

The Long Road from Joint Venture to Global Dominance

ASML's origin story is remarkably modest. In 1984, two Dutch companies—Philips, the electronics giant, and ASM International, a semiconductor equipment maker—formed a joint venture. They set up shop in a leaky building on the Philips campus in Eindhoven. Early employees reportedly had to work around buckets catching rainwater.

The company went public in 1988 and changed its name from ASM Lithography to simply ASML, declaring the letters no longer an abbreviation. For years, it was a minor player. Canon and Nikon, the Japanese camera companies, dominated the lithography market. ASML was the scrappy European underdog.

The turning point came in 1991 with the PAS 5500 platform. Micron Technology, then one of the world's largest memory chip producers, adopted it. The system was good enough, and cheap enough, to challenge the Japanese incumbents.

By 1997, ASML's leadership made a fateful bet. They started serious research into extreme ultraviolet technology, recognizing that conventional approaches would eventually hit a wall. Two years later, they joined a consortium with Intel and other American chipmakers to access fundamental research from the United States Department of Energy's national laboratories.

This partnership was crucial. The basic physics of extreme ultraviolet lithography had been explored at American national labs like Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. ASML needed that knowledge base. The collaboration also required congressional approval because it involved technology developed with taxpayer funding.

In 2000, ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group, an American competitor that also had licenses to the extreme ultraviolet research. This gave them a foothold in the United States and access to more intellectual property.

By 2002, ASML had become the world's largest supplier of lithography equipment. But the extreme ultraviolet bet was just getting started.

Two Decades of Doubt

For most of its development history, extreme ultraviolet lithography was considered a boondoggle. The technical challenges seemed insurmountable. Year after year, the technology was "five years away."

The first functional chips made with extreme ultraviolet came in 2009, at the IMEC research center in Belgium—22 nanometer memory cells using a prototype machine. But moving from lab demonstrations to commercial production took years more.

Depending on how you count, ASML shipped its first production extreme ultraviolet machine in either 2011 or 2013. Even then, the systems were unreliable. Early machines could only operate for a few hours before requiring maintenance. Chipmakers were skeptical they'd ever work well enough for high-volume manufacturing.

The breakthrough came gradually, through relentless engineering. By 2022, ASML had shipped about 140 extreme ultraviolet systems. The machines now run reliably around the clock in the factories of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung, and Intel.

Revenue tells the story of success. ASML earned $13 billion in 2018. By 2024, that figure had grown to $35 billion. The company's market capitalization reached approximately $419 billion by late 2025, making it Europe's largest technology company and one of the most valuable corporations on the continent.

The Geopolitics of Light

When you control the machines that make all advanced chips possible, you become a geopolitical weapon whether you want to or not.

ASML found itself at the center of the technological rivalry between the United States and China starting around 2018. The Trump administration began pressuring the Dutch government to block sales of extreme ultraviolet machines to China. The Biden administration continued and intensified this pressure.

The Dutch initially resisted. ASML is a private company, after all, and China was a lucrative market. But by March 2023, the Netherlands imposed export restrictions on advanced chip-making equipment, citing national security. These controls took effect in September 2023, then tightened further in January 2024 and again in January 2025.

The restrictions created a strange legal situation. In June 2023, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights ruled that ASML could legally reject job applications from residents of countries under United States export sanctions—including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria—even though Dutch law prohibits nationality-based discrimination. The need to comply with American regulations trumped domestic anti-discrimination principles.

China hasn't simply accepted these restrictions. Reports emerged in December 2025 that Chinese entities had secretly built a prototype extreme ultraviolet machine in Shenzhen, allegedly with help from former ASML engineers. The machine reportedly might produce working chips between 2028 and 2030.

Whether China can actually replicate decades of ASML's engineering remains to be seen. The extreme ultraviolet supply chain is extraordinarily complex. The mirrors alone—made by Carl Zeiss in Germany to atomic-level precision—took years to develop. The light source, the vacuum systems, the motion control mechanisms that position wafers with nanometer accuracy—each component represents accumulated expertise that can't be easily copied.

Intellectual Property and Espionage

ASML has been a repeated target of industrial espionage, and China keeps coming up.

In 2015, employees at ASML's Silicon Valley software subsidiary were caught stealing confidential data. The company didn't publicly identify who was behind it, but the timing and context suggested foreign involvement.

In 2021, ASML's annual report mentioned a Chinese company called Dongfang Jingyuan Electron that appeared to be marketing products potentially infringing on ASML's intellectual property. The United States Department of Commerce expressed concern about economic espionage targeting the company.

Then in February 2023, ASML announced that a former employee in China had allegedly stolen information about the company's technology. Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad later reported that this individual had subsequently gone to work for Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that has been under heavy American sanctions.

These incidents underscore why ASML's technology has become a matter of national security. Control over chipmaking is control over the computing power that drives modern economies and militaries.

The Ecosystem of Impossibility

ASML doesn't work alone. The company employs over 42,000 people from 143 nationalities and relies on nearly 5,000 tier-one suppliers—companies that directly provide major components.

Carl Zeiss makes the mirrors. Cymer—which ASML acquired in 2012—builds the light sources. Berliner Glas, a German optical glassmaker acquired in 2020, provides additional components. Hermes Microvision, a Taiwanese company bought in 2016 for $3.1 billion, contributes technology for inspecting the patterns on wafers.

The supply chain is deliberately distributed. Key suppliers sit in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Taiwan. This geographic spread creates both resilience and vulnerability. It means no single country controls everything, but it also means that coordinated export controls—like those imposed on China—can effectively deny access to the technology.

Intel invested $4.1 billion in ASML back in 2012, acquiring 15 percent of the company. The investment was meant to accelerate development of both extreme ultraviolet technology and the transition to larger 450-millimeter wafers. The larger wafer effort was eventually paused in 2013, but the extreme ultraviolet work paid off spectacularly.

What Comes Next

The next frontier is High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography. The "NA" stands for numerical aperture—essentially, how wide an angle of light the optics can capture. A higher numerical aperture means finer detail.

ASML's current extreme ultraviolet systems have a numerical aperture of 0.33. The High-NA systems increase this to 0.55. The first research-and-development units shipped to Intel in December 2023 and to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in late 2024.

At $370 million each, these machines cost nearly twice as much as their predecessors. They're even larger and more complex. But they're necessary for chipmakers who want to keep shrinking transistors and packing more computing power into each chip.

The semiconductor industry follows a relentless logic. Smaller transistors mean faster, more efficient chips. More transistors per chip mean more capable devices. The smartphone in your pocket contains more computing power than existed in the entire world fifty years ago, and that trajectory continues.

ASML sits at the bottleneck of this progress. Every major chipmaker—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung, Intel—depends on ASML's machines to push forward. There is no alternative supplier for extreme ultraviolet lithography. If ASML stopped shipping machines, the entire semiconductor industry would freeze.

The Company Nobody Knows

Despite its significance, ASML remains remarkably obscure to the general public. Apple and NVIDIA get the headlines. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has become famous as the world's contract chipmaker. Intel remains a household name from decades of "Intel Inside" marketing.

But ASML? It sells to other businesses, not consumers. It's headquartered in a small Dutch town most people can't pronounce. Its products are incomprehensibly complex machines that only a handful of companies can afford.

Yet without ASML, there would be no advanced iPhones, no cutting-edge NVIDIA graphics cards, no high-performance Intel processors. The entire edifice of modern computing rests on this single company's ability to bend light at scales that strain the limits of physics.

ASML sponsors the PSV Eindhoven football club and the local marathon—very Dutch, very modest for a company worth more than most countries' annual economic output. The contrast between its low public profile and its extraordinary importance captures something essential about how modern technology works.

The most critical infrastructure is often invisible. The most consequential companies are often unknown. And sometimes, the future of global technology comes down to hitting fifty thousand droplets of molten tin per second with a laser, in a small building in the southern Netherlands, while the world goes on completely unaware.