Every advanced chip on earth — in every smartphone, laptop, and AI data center — is made with a machine that only one company builds. ASML, based in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, is the world's sole supplier of EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography systems, the most complex production machines ever made: each one weighs 180 tonnes, costs over US$150 million, and contains more than 100,000 parts shipped from suppliers across the globe.
The company's journey was a 30-year gamble: from its 1984 founding as a Philips/ASMI joint venture, through near-bankruptcy in the 1990s, to its bet on EUV technology in the 2000s — a bet that required synchronizing an entire industry and that finally paid off when EUV entered volume production around 2019. Today ASML holds a monopoly position that no competitor has meaningfully challenged, with a backlog worth tens of billions of euros.
With about 42,000 employees and annual revenue near €28 billion, ASML's machines print the patterns that define chip generations: the most advanced logic chips from TSMC, Samsung, and Intel all require ASML EUV. For the semiconductor industry, ASML is not a supplier to negotiate with — it is the bottleneck every other company plans around.
