ASML’s most expensive machines now have four of the world’s biggest chipmakers as customers, and the Dutch company said the orders keep coming. Reuters reported from Amsterdam on September 14 that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung, Intel, and SK Hynix had all committed to the company’s High NA EUV lithography systems. The machines represent the next generation of the equipment used to print the finest features on advanced chips.
Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen said the artificial-intelligence boom has changed how customers think. The existing EUV models, which sell for roughly $200 million each, are essentially sold out, he said. Demand that once tracked the gradual march of chip manufacturing now moves with the urgency of AI data-center buildouts.
High NA EUV is the successor to the EUV machines that have defined advanced chipmaking for nearly a decade. The high numerical aperture systems gather more of the light they project, allowing manufacturers to draw finer circuit patterns without the double-patterning steps that slow production and add cost. Each system costs several hundred million dollars and takes months to install and calibrate.
ASML sits in a position no other company occupies. It is the only supplier of EUV lithography, a role it earned through decades of investment that competitors declined to match. The company’s machines use extreme ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers to carve patterns far finer than older deep-ultraviolet tools could manage, and no rival has shipped a competing system.
Intel said it has already processed one million wafers using High NA equipment, a figure that suggests the technology is moving from demonstration to routine use. TSMC has said it plans to use the machines for high-volume production in 2030. Samsung and SK Hynix, the two Korean memory leaders, are adopting the tools for both logic and memory applications.
The customer list matters because it removes a lingering question about whether High NA would win broad adoption. When ASML first shipped the systems, some analysts wondered whether the cost would limit them to a single buyer or two. The fact that all four leading manufacturers have now signed on suggests the economics have been accepted, analysts said.
ASML is also investing in the infrastructure around the machines. The company broke ground last week on an expansion of its Eindhoven campus, and it is pushing to shift the photomasks used with EUV systems from six-inch to twelve-inch plates. By ASML’s own estimate, the larger masks could raise productivity by roughly 40 percent.
The twelve-inch mask effort has partners, and their target is a pilot production line by 2031. Moving to larger masks is a hard engineering problem, because the plates must remain perfectly flat under the intense heat of EUV light. The payoff, however, is significant: more chips printed per pass through the machine, which lowers the cost of each wafer.
High NA raises the aperture of the projection optics from 0.33 to 0.55, which in practical terms means the machine can resolve smaller features in a single exposure. That reduces the need for multiple passes and cuts the time and cost of making the most advanced logic chips. The tradeoff is price and complexity: the newer systems are larger, heavier, and more expensive than their predecessors.
TSMC’s stated 2030 timeline suggests the current generation of EUV will carry the industry through several more product cycles before High NA takes over at scale. Intel’s million-wafer figure, by contrast, signals that it intends to lead the transition. The two positions reflect different bets on how quickly the next node will arrive.
The AI boom is the force behind all of it. Chipmakers are spending heavily to add capacity for the accelerators that train and run AI models, and those accelerators demand the most advanced lithography available. Dassen said the shift in customer behavior is complete, and the company’s order book reflects it.
For ASML, the challenge is now execution. The company must build, ship, and install systems that are among the most complex machines ever made, on a schedule its customers expect to match their own buildouts. Any slip in that chain ripples through the entire industry, analysts said.
ASML’s earlier EUV machines took years to win the industry over. TSMC first put EUV into volume production in 2019 for its seven-nanometer node, and Samsung and Intel followed on later nodes. The adoption curve for High NA is expected to be faster, because the AI buildout has shortened the industry’s tolerance for waiting.
The shift also has a cost. Each High NA machine is among the most expensive pieces of industrial equipment ever sold, and a fab filled with them represents a multi-billion-dollar commitment. Chipmakers have accepted that price because the alternative, stretching older tools further, slows the race to the next node.
The four-customer lineup also concentrates ASML’s exposure. A handful of companies now account for much of its most advanced business, and their spending plans will determine the company’s near-term trajectory. For now, those plans point up.
