ASML Holding N.V.

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 than the step-and-repeat approach used by Nikon and Canon. 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. The machines are assembled with components from over 800 suppliers in 24 countries — a supply chain so complex that disrupting it would take years to repair. 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.

ASML's market capitalisation exceeded $300 billion by 2023, making it the most valuable company in Europe. Its EUV machines are the only way to manufacture the most advanced chips used in AI, smartphones, and military equipment. The company's monopoly on EUV technology means that any country or company that wants access to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing must obtain ASML's machines — or do without. The small startup that had begun in a leaky shed in 1984 had become a chokepoint in the global economy, with governments around the world treating its export licenses as matters of national security.