The notice went out quietly in early September, routed through ASML’s Korean subsidiary. By the time it reached the purchasing departments of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the world’s dominant maker of lithography machines had already made up its mind.
ASML is raising the price of replacement parts for the lithography equipment it supplies in South Korea by a uniform 10%, covering every spare part for both its EUV and DUV machines, according to a report in the Korean trade publication The Elec. The new prices apply to deliveries starting in January 2027.
Both Samsung and SK Hynix, the two customers that buy the vast majority of ASML’s most advanced machines in the country, accepted the increase after a round of negotiations, The Elec reported. The two memory-chip makers run large fleets of ASML equipment, and every machine depends on a steady supply of consumables and replacement components to keep operating.
The increase covers more than the routine. It applies to consumables ordered on a regular schedule and to the critical parts replaced only when a machine breaks down or its performance degrades: the optical assemblies, light sources and precision stages that make extreme ultraviolet lithography possible in the first place.
ASML, based in the Dutch town of Veldhoven, is the largest semiconductor equipment maker in the world by market value, and its lithography machines are the bottleneck through which nearly every advanced chip passes. The newest of those machines cost hundreds of millions of dollars each and take months to install, which means a fab is committed to ASML long after the initial purchase.
ASML holds a position few suppliers can claim. It is the sole producer of EUV machines, which use extreme ultraviolet light to print the most advanced chips, and its installed base keeps growing as Samsung and SK Hynix expand capacity for AI memory. A customer that needs a replacement part has nowhere else to go.
The company’s pricing power has been building for years. One semiconductor industry official told The Elec that material costs have risen, but that the improving profitability of customers gave equipment makers room to charge more. In plain terms, the chipmakers can afford it, so the supplier is asking.
The timing is deliberate. Samsung and SK Hynix are in the middle of an AI-driven memory boom, with high-bandwidth memory and other advanced chips commanding prices far above their historical levels. Their margins have recovered, and with them their willingness to absorb higher costs from a supplier they cannot replace.
The memory cycle is the reason the customers nodded along. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits beside AI accelerators, has become the most profitable product in the memory business, and both Korean chipmakers are expanding capacity to meet demand from the likes of Nvidia. When a customer is sold out and booking record prices for its output, a 10% increase on spare parts is easier to swallow.
The increase is confined to South Korea, at least for now. That is where the negotiating power is clearest: the country’s two chipmakers produce a large share of the world’s most advanced memory, and both run ASML machines around the clock.
For Samsung and SK Hynix, the rise lands as another cost in a stack that is already climbing. They are paying more for wafers, more for electricity and more for the equipment itself. A 10% increase in spare parts will lift the operating cost of every fab, though it does not translate into a 10% rise in overall manufacturing cost, since parts are only one slice of the expense.
Spare parts have long been the quieter half of the lithography business. A machine that runs for a decade generates a stream of revenue through consumables and replacements that can rival the original sale, and it is steadier than the boom-and-bust cycles of new equipment orders.
The 2027 start date also matters. By pushing the increase to deliveries more than a year out, ASML gives the chipmakers time to fold the higher cost into their own budgets and contracts, and it avoids a mid-cycle shock to fabs that are already running flat out. It is a price rise designed to land without a fight.
The acceptance matters as much as the number. That the two largest buyers agreed, after a month of back-and-forth, tells the rest of the industry where pricing power has moved. Other equipment suppliers such as Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron have been pressing their own increases, and customers have little room to resist when their own order books are full.
The lithography business has always been a toll road: customers pay for the machine, then pay to keep it running. ASML’s notice to Korea shows that the toll, like everything else in the AI supply chain, now rises with demand.
