ASML, Veldhoven
The world's only maker of EUV machines. Without Veldhoven, no leading-edge chip can be patterned. A single-supplier chain on which the entire technological frontier depends.
ASML (Veldhoven) remains in 2026 the sole global supplier of EUV lithography machines — a 100% monopoly — with no credible competitor expected for a long time.CSET, Georgetown University, 2024 ↗
No leading-edge chip exists without a machine built by a single company in the world, in a single town in the Netherlands. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, the only way to etch patterns a few nanometers wide, is an absolute monopoly of ASML. And this monopoly conceals three others, deeper still: without Zeiss optics, the Cymer light source and the TRUMPF laser, ASML itself grinds to a halt.
In one year, Taiwan's share collapses (29 % → 15 %) while China surges (26 % → 36 %): a massive clearing of the Chinese backlog ahead of tightening export controls. Base: total revenue, service included (on system sales alone, China reaches 41 %). Source: ASML, 20-F FY2024 report (SEC).
The sole maker of a 380-million machine
Etching a pattern a few nanometers wide requires light of extremely short wavelength: 13.5 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet. This light passes through no lens, it is absorbed by everything, including air, and must therefore be produced in a vacuum and reflected by mirrors of unprecedented perfection. Mastering this chain took three decades and more than six billion euros of R&D from ASML alone. Result: Nikon and Canon gave up, and ASML is the sole maker of these machines in the world.
The monopoly is a structural fact: there is literally no other supplier. Every roadmap beyond 7 nanometers, hence every AI chip, every high-end smartphone, is capped by the number of machines a single Veldhoven factory produces in a year: 44 EUV in 2024, a target capacity of about 90.
A monopoly built on three sub-monopolies
ASML is an integrator: it assembles a machine whose vital organs each come from a single, irreplaceable supplier. Its own reference document states it bluntly: "the highly specialized nature of many components, particularly for EUV systems, makes it uneconomical to source from more than one supplier."
The optics, mirrors and lenses, come exclusively from Carl Zeiss SMT, in Germany, the only firm able to polish surfaces smoother than ever manufactured: on the scale of a country, a bump of one millimeter. ASML acknowledges that its total production capacity is capped by that of Zeiss, of which it holds 24.9 %. The light source, a tin plasma struck fifty thousand times per second, comes from Cymer, which ASML had to buy out in 2013 for lack of any way to second-source it. And the high-power CO₂ laser that vaporizes the tin comes from TRUMPF, a third firm with no substitute.
The full chain, ASML, Cymer, TRUMPF, Zeiss, has no redundancy on its critical links. This is why export controls bite: you can copy blueprints, but you can buy neither the source nor the mirrors.
Why no one catches up
EUV was born of an American public program in the 1990s (Livermore, Berkeley, Sandia, DARPA, DOE), then of a consortium funded by Intel, which Nikon refused to join and from which Canon was excluded; ASML, Dutch and therefore "neutral," was admitted. Three decades later, ASML still spends about 4.3 billion euros of R&D per year. No challenger can close this gap through capital alone.
China has tried. Its best public tool, an immersion DUV scanner from SMEE, lags by about a decade and remains far from EUV, of which, moreover, no machine has ever been delivered to China, the export license having expired in 2019 under American pressure. CSIS judges that fully replicating ASML's machine "is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future." The obstacle is not a patent but an entire ecosystem already spoken for.
The real lever: service
The real lever of power is the servicing, not the sale. An EUV machine requires continuous ASML calibration, parts and updates; the collector mirror of the tin plasma degrades and is replaced roughly every year. Cutting support does not render the machine useless overnight, but a fab's yields degrade in a few months, not years.
ASML remotely monitors its entire installed fleet and detects any interruption. This service dependence turns every machine sold into a permanent link: an embargo that includes service reaches a country's existing capacity far faster than a mere halt in deliveries. It is there, more than in the price of the machines, that ASML's geopolitical power resides.