ASML Holding N.V. is the narrowest chokepoint in the modern global economy, and its origins were anything but grand. In 1984 the Dutch electronics conglomerate Philips had a wafer stepper project it could not afford to commercialize, the PAS 2000, and spun it into a 50-50 joint venture with a smaller Dutch equipment company, ASM International. The new company, ASM Lithography, began operations on April 1, 1984 in a Philips building in Eindhoven with 47 of the 50 engineers from the Philips wafer stepper group. It built lithography machines, the systems that use light to print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. For its first decade it barely survived, competing against the far larger Japanese leaders Nikon and Canon. In 1988 ASM International stopped funding it, and only a final 30 million guilder investment from Philips, pushed through by board member Henk Bodt, kept the company alive.
Systems integration and the TWINSCAN
ASML won the industry through a different engineering model. Where Nikon and Canon built their machines in-house, ASML acted as a systems integrator: it bought its optics from the German firm Carl Zeiss from 1986 and its light sources from Cymer in the United States, and concentrated on integrating the system. That let it iterate faster. The PAS 5500 platform launched in 1991 won the first large orders from Intel and IBM and took the company to profitability, and ASML listed in Amsterdam and on Nasdaq in 1995. In 2001 it introduced TWINSCAN, a dual-stage architecture that measures one wafer while exposing another, and completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley Group. In 2003 the TWINSCAN AT:1150i became the first immersion machine, printing through a layer of ultrapure water to raise resolution. By the mid-2000s ASML had passed Nikon in lithography market share and has not given the lead back.
Two decades to make EUV work
The source of ASML's current position is extreme ultraviolet lithography. As features shrank, 193 nanometer light became too coarse, and EUV at 13.5 nanometers was the way forward. The physics are punishing: the machine fires a high-power laser at molten tin droplets roughly 50,000 times a second to create a plasma that emits EUV light, which is absorbed by glass and air and so must be steered by mirrors polished to near-atomic smoothness inside a vacuum. It took roughly two decades. The first prototype, the NXE:3100, shipped in 2010; the NXE:3300 followed in 2013; production systems were only ordered in batches from 2016 and shipped from 2017. The program was so expensive that in 2012 ASML asked its three largest customers for help, and Intel, TSMC and Samsung took an aggregate 23 percent stake for ~$4.35 billion (3.85 billion euros) and committed a further ~$1.56 billion (1.38 billion euros) of R&D funding. ASML bought Cymer in 2013 to take direct control of the light source.
The only supplier
ASML is the sole supplier of EUV systems, and no competitor has announced a credible programme to build one. The optics come only from Carl Zeiss SMT, in which ASML holds a 24.9 percent stake, and ASML states that if that supply relationship ended it would effectively be unable to conduct its business. In 2025 ASML reported total net sales of ~$37 billion (32.7 billion euros), up 15.6 percent, net income of ~$10.8 billion (9.6 billion euros) and a gross margin of 52.8 percent. It sold 535 systems, including 44 NXE and four High-NA EXE units, and closed the year with a backlog of ~$43.8 billion (38.8 billion euros) of which ~$28.8 billion (25.5 billion euros) was EUV. The next generation is already shipping: the first full-specification TWINSCAN EXE:5200B went out in April 2025 at 175 wafers per hour, and ASML expects the High-NA platform to support high-volume manufacturing from 2027.
A geopolitical chokepoint
Because advanced computing depends on these machines, ASML has become a lever in the technology dispute between the United States and China. The Netherlands has not licensed EUV exports to China since 2019, extended controls to advanced DUV immersion systems in 2023, added certain metrology and inspection systems in January 2025, and the EU folded those Dutch controls into its own control list in November 2025. Customers in China still accounted for 29.1 percent of ASML 2025 net sales, down from 36.1 percent in 2024. The concentration runs the other way too: four customers each took more than 10 percent of 2025 sales and together 61.2 percent, Taiwan accounted for 25.5 percent and South Korea 25.0 percent. ASML guided 2026 net sales of 34 billion to ~$44.1 billion (39 billion euros), and at its November 2024 Investor Day set out 2030 scenarios of roughly 44 billion to ~$67.8 billion (60 billion euros).
