ASML: The Dutch Monopoly on EUV Lithography Machines

ASML is a Dutch company, spun out of Philips in the 1980s, that holds an effective monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to manufacture leading-edge semiconductors. Intel, Nikon, and Canon all attempted EUV development and stepped back; only ASML, partnered with German optics maker Zeiss, brought a commercial system to market. The machine is not a typical monopoly in the antitrust sense — it is a 'literally no one else can do this' monopoly, the product of three decades of compounding engineering breakthroughs across thousands of suppliers. ASML's first-generation low-NA EUV machines, shipped from 2016 onward, run at 0.33 numerical aperture and print features around 13nm. The next-generation high-NA EUV system, shipping from 2024 to 2026, uses larger 0.55 NA optics, delivers an 8x vertical and 4x horizontal shrink, and can print features as small as 8nm. Each high-NA unit costs roughly 350 million euros (about 400 million USD), ships in 25 trucks and 7 Boeing 747s, integrates roughly 100,000 parts from 5,000 suppliers, and contains around 40,000 bolts, 3,000 cables, and 2 kilometers of internal hosing. ASML's market capitalization peaked near 350 billion euros in 2024, briefly making it Europe's most valuable technology company. The strategic importance follows directly: Moore's Law continued past the late-2000s deep-UV wall only because EUV worked. Every TSMC and Samsung leading-edge fab depends on these machines. Without ASML, the modern chip industry's roadmap stops. See The Strait of Hormuz: The World's Most Critical Oil Chokepoint for the closest analogue in commodity infrastructure — ASML plays a similar role for compute.