ASML

ASML was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between Philips — the Dutch electronics giant — and Advanced Semiconductor Materials International (ASMI). The company began operations in a temporary shed behind a Philips building in Eindhoven, Netherlands, with 31 employees. Its mission was to build photolithography machines — devices that project circuit patterns onto silicon wafers using light. The machines were already being made by Japanese competitors Nikon and Canon, who dominated the market. ASML was a small, underfunded startup competing against established Japanese industrial giants.

ASML introduced the step-and-scan lithography system in 1995 — a technical approach that moved both the mask (pattern) and the wafer during exposure, enabling more precise circuit printing. The innovation proved decisive: ASML's machines could print smaller features more accurately. Semiconductor manufacturers began preferring ASML machines. Nikon and Canon, wedded to their existing approach, struggled to catch up. By the early 2000s, ASML had overtaken both Japanese companies to become the world's largest lithography equipment manufacturer.

ASML needed approximately €2.7 billion to develop Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography — a technology using light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres, 70 times shorter than visible light, to print circuit features smaller than anything achievable with conventional light. The investment was beyond ASML's resources. In 2012, ASML's three largest customers — Intel, Samsung, and TSMC — collectively invested €3.85 billion in ASML and took minority stakes, ensuring the EUV programme could proceed. The customers were investing in the supplier whose success was essential to their own.

ASML shipped its first commercial EUV machines in 2018. Each machine weighs 180 tonnes, contains over 100,000 parts, requires a Boeing 747 and several large cargo planes to deliver, and costs approximately $150-200 million. Only ASML makes them. No EUV machine has ever been successfully replicated. When the U.S. government restricted the sale of advanced ASML machines to Chinese chip manufacturers in 2023, it demonstrated that ASML had become one of the most strategically important companies in the world — a single Dutch company in a converted shed had become a chokepoint in the global semiconductor supply chain.

ASML reported full-year 2025 revenues of €32.7 billion — up 15.6% — with gross margin of 51.8%. The company closed 2025 with a backlog of €38.8 billion and Q4 2025 net bookings of €13.2 billion — a record — including €7.4 billion of EUV. ASML guided 2030 revenue of €44-60 billion as High-NA EUV (its next-generation lithography technology) ramped and AI-driven chip demand continued expanding. The small startup that had begun in a leaky shed in 1984 had become a €300 billion market cap company and arguably the most strategically indispensable business in the global economy — the sole manufacturer of the machines required to make every advanced AI chip in the world.