In Veldhoven, the machines are finally doing what the industry hoped they would. ASML raised its revenue guidance for 2026 in a quarterly update this week, citing progress on its most expensive and most anticipated product: High-NA EUV lithography. The company confirmed that the next-generation scanner has moved into Intel’s advanced production lines, and that customers are beginning to commit to a technology that, until recently, most chipmakers treated as a question for the next decade.
The commercial signal had been building for a week. On July 15, Intel Foundry said it had entered high-volume manufacturing for a subset of its Core Ultra Series 3 processors, code-named Panther Lake, using ASML’s EXE High-NA EUV systems on its 18A process node. Intel said specific 18A layers were now qualified on High-NA in its Oregon facility, with yields matched to its existing EUV platform, making it the first company in the industry to ship high-volume logic chips printed with the new technology.
High-NA, short for high numerical aperture, is the largest step change in chip printing since extreme ultraviolet lithography entered production a decade ago. The new systems use a 0.55 numerical aperture, up from 0.33 for the current generation, which lets them print features 1.7 times smaller with a single exposure and achieve roughly 2.9 times the transistor density of existing EUV machines. The trade-off is cost: each High-NA system is priced in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the machines are so complex that only a handful can be built in a year.
Intel’s lead is no accident. The company was the first to install ASML’s initial High-NA prototype in 2024 at its Hillsboro, Oregon research site, and it took delivery of the second-generation EXE:5200B before any other chipmaker. Intel has spent years ceding process leadership to TSMC, and its foundry business has struggled to win outside customers, but High-NA gives it a story it has lacked: a technology it adopted first, at scale, in production. Its executives have framed the qualification as proof that the foundry’s manufacturing arm can execute at the industry’s frontier.
For ASML, the shift solves a business problem. The company’s revenue has been concentrated in its existing EUV line, and High-NA was expected to remain a niche product for years, a few machines sold to early adopters while volume waited for the next node cycle. The Intel qualification, and the guidance raise that followed it, suggest that timeline is compressing. Analysts said ASML’s order book for High-NA now extends through the end of the decade, and that the company’s production capacity for the machines, long seen as a constraint, is becoming a seller’s market.
The competitive pressure on TSMC is the subtext. The Taiwanese giant has been publicly cautious about High-NA, saying it will use the technology selectively at its most advanced nodes while wringing more from existing EUV. That caution made sense when TSMC held a commanding lead, but Intel’s qualification changes the calculation: if High-NA becomes the standard for the most advanced chips, the company that controls its supply, and its learning curve, has an advantage in the race to sell manufacturing to others. TSMC has taken delivery of High-NA systems for evaluation, and analysts expect its adoption to accelerate under competitive pressure.
Samsung, the third company in the leading-edge race, is also evaluating High-NA for its next nodes, and the industry’s collective shift means ASML’s biggest customers are now competing for a technology that only ASML makes. The company’s position is the envy of its suppliers’ customers: no matter who wins the foundry race, ASML sells the machines to all of them, and High-NA extends that franchise into the next decade. The guidance raise is the financial expression of that position.
The risk is on the demand side. High-NA machines only pay for themselves at the highest volumes, and if the AI-driven boom in leading-edge chips slows, chipmakers could stretch their existing EUV fleets longer rather than buy the new machines. ASML’s executives acknowledged that uncertainty in their update, but the Intel qualification gives them something more valuable than reassurance: a proof point, in production, that the technology works at the scale the industry requires.
For Intel, the timing is everything. The company’s foundry ambitions have been tested by losses, leadership changes and customer skepticism, and its turnaround depends on winning manufacturing orders from companies that have long bought from TSMC. Being first to High-NA does not guarantee those orders, but it removes the argument that Intel is a follower. The machine that almost no one could afford has become the machine Intel says proves it can compete.
