The $400 million machine powering the future of chips

ASML, the Dutch company that commands roughly 90% of the global market for lithography equipment used to manufacture semiconductors, has just begun shipping its new and most advanced machine to chip factories: the high numerical aperture EUV system (high-NA EUV), with a sale price of $400 million per unit. The MIT Technology Review article, written by Clive Thompson and published on June 23, 2026, takes a detailed tour of the engineering behind this colossal device, ASML's history as a company, the geopolitical implications of its monopoly, and the attempts by China and several startups to wrest the crown from it.

**A machine of epic proportions**

The journalist accompanies Jos Benschop, ASML's executive vice president of technology and a 66-year-old man who has spent more than a decade designing this machine, as he literally climbs to the top of the apparatus. The system is the size of a double-decker bus, weighs more than 150 tons, occupies more than 200 cubic meters, and is covered in thousands of tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. Despite having overseen every detail of its construction, Benschop himself confesses that he sometimes looks at it and thinks, «My God.» The goal of all this engineering titanism is to achieve circuit patterns with a resolution of just eight nanometers —the width of about 40 silicon atoms— compared with the 13 nanometers the first EUV machines launched in 2017 could reach.

**The art of printing transistors: lithography**

To understand what ASML does, the article explains that making chips is, in essence, similar to screen-printing a T-shirt. You start with a pattern etched onto a «reticle» (a mask that carries the design), project light onto it, and that light transfers the pattern to the silicon wafer, interacting with a chemical layer that fixes it. The shorter the wavelength of the light used, the smaller the chip's components can be. The history of lithography has followed a cyclical pattern: find a good light source, increase the numerical aperture to sharpen the focus as much as possible, and finally make the leap to a shorter-wavelength light. From the visible light the industry used until the early 1990s (about 400 nm), it moved to deep ultraviolet (DUV, 193 nm) and then, after 16 years of research and some $10 billion in R&D, it reached extreme ultraviolet (EUV), with a wavelength only just above the X-ray range.

**The 16-year leap to EUV**

Around 2001, when ASML was still a second-tier player in the lithography market, it bet on EUV while competitors such as Nikon and Canon pulled back upon seeing the obstacles. EUV radiation is absorbed both by conventional glass lenses and by air itself, which forced the design of a system that operates in a vacuum and generates that light by vaporizing droplets of molten tin with a laser, tens of thousands of times per second. The mirrors that direct the light had to be manufactured by Germany's Zeiss using entirely new ion-beam polishing techniques to eliminate the tiniest imperfections. Jeff Koch, a former ASML employee and now an analyst at SemiAnalysis, sums it up bluntly: «It's a very engineering-driven company: let's send thousands of engineers to hammer away at these problems. That's what they did, and it worked.»

**The AI boom and the commercial takeoff**

The first EUV machines hit the market in 2017 at a price of more than $100 million. There was some skepticism about whether demand would be sufficient, given that the industry had developed ingenious tricks to squeeze the DUV technology (such as adding a layer of water over the wafer to focus the light better). But the timing proved providential: a few years after the launch, OpenAI released GPT-3 and then ChatGPT, triggering an arms race in artificial intelligence that drove up demand for high-end chips. Companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic rushed to build huge server farms to train and deploy language models, and Nvidia began selling its elite GPUs —at $40,000 a unit— without being able to meet all the demand. In 2025, according to the article, ASML sold nearly 50 EUV machines and generated some $40 billion in revenue, with a market capitalization exceeding half a trillion dollars.

**High-NA: more resolution without changing the light**

To keep advancing in miniaturization, ASML did not opt this time to look for a new light source. Instead, it took the second step in the cycle: increasing the numerical aperture (NA). The new machine raises the NA from 0.33 to 0.55, which makes it possible to nearly halve the size of transistors and almost triple their density on the chip. That sounds evolutionary, not revolutionary, but in practice it posed formidable engineering challenges.

The main problem is shadow. In an EUV machine, the light is projected onto the reticle and an optical system demagnifies it to transfer the pattern to the wafer. With a higher NA, the light reaches the reticle at steeper angles, and because the pattern etched on it is three-dimensional, those angles create shadows that distort the final pattern, just as grazing sunlight casts shadows in the Grand Canyon. The solution was to redesign the geometry of the pattern on the reticle (the design is now twice as long as it is wide, stretched in one dimension) and to adapt the mirror system.

This geometric change had a direct consequence: the area of the wafer exposed in each scan was cut in half compared with the original EUV, which threatened to lower the machine's productivity. To compensate, the engineers brutally sped up the movement of the reticle, which now moves with accelerations of up to 22 g. «Don't try to sit on top of it, because you'd pass out,» warns Marco Pieters, ASML's CTO. The wafer stage also moves faster to stay in sync with the reticle.

**Zeiss and the 12-ton mirrors**

On the optical side, Zeiss had to design mirrors twice as large as those in the previous EUV machines. The projection system that carries the light from the reticle to the wafer weighs 12 tons, seven times more than the first generation's. Zeiss built a new robot-assisted production line to manufacture and handle these colossal devices, and says they are the smoothest surfaces it has ever made. At the same time, ASML's team in San Diego (where the EUV light source is made) boosted the laser's power by hitting each tin droplet three times instead of two, which required speeding up the system by an additional 50%. The consequences are physically impressive: the lasers needed for a single machine now fill an entire room.

**Intel, the first customer**

When the first high-NA unit came off the assembly line, Intel was already waiting. The company bought the first available machine, and in the spring of 2024 some 300 ASML engineers traveled to Oregon to assemble it and tune it up at Intel's D1X factory. «ASML showed up with a giant bow on one of the boxes,» Mark Phillips, an Intel Fellow and the company's director of hardware and lithography solutions, recounts with a laugh. Phillips says he is «very pleased with the rapid pace of the tool's health,» although he does not reveal when they will begin using it for mass production; analysts expect it will be over the course of the next year, first incorporating it into a few precision components and gradually expanding its use.

What is at stake for Intel is recovering its historic prominence. During the 2010s it lost ground in mobile chips to Apple (which designs its own chips and has them made at TSMC) and in AI GPUs to Nvidia, while Google began designing its own accelerators (TPUs), also manufactured by TSMC. In 2021 Intel announced a major strategic shift: creating a foundry division to compete directly with TSMC, manufacturing third-party designs. Being the first to master high-NA technology would be a crucial competitive advantage in that race.

**The duopoly that unsettles the world**

The article stresses that the advanced chip manufacturing sector is effectively controlled by just two main players: ASML, which makes the lithography machines, and TSMC, the Taiwanese giant that uses those machines to produce the vast majority of the planet's most advanced chips. This duopoly has geopolitical implications of the first order. Marc Hijink, author of the book *Focus: The ASML Way*, sums it up with a cutting phrase: «Chips are the new oil.» And in that metaphor, ASML would be the Strait of Hormuz: the strategic chokepoint that can paralyze anyone who lacks access to it.

James Proud, co-founder and CEO of the lithography startup Substrate, warns that the United States depends «dangerously» on a supply chain located abroad and increasingly expensive. «There is an enormous concentration in a very small number of players, and the supply chain is simply very expensive,» he argues.

**The embargo on China and the Asian giant's response**

In 2019, under pressure from the Trump administration, the Dutch government imposed an embargo that bars ASML from selling its high-end EUV machines to Chinese companies. That ban is part of a broader Washington strategy to keep China from developing advanced AI chips. The measure enraged the Chinese government and pushed it to devote billions of dollars to trying to replicate EUV technology on its own.

A Reuters report from early 2026 revealed that a secret Chinese government laboratory, which employs former ASML workers, had managed to assemble an EUV machine so large that it takes up an entire building's floor. Experts are skeptical about its real capability: Hijink believes it could make some chips, but doubts it can do so at industrial scale. Efficiency is not China's immediate goal, Koch notes: «They'd be thrilled with a machine that produces one wafer an hour and costs them a fortune to operate. They'd build a factory with a thousand of those and be perfectly happy.»

Until they manage to master EUV, the Chinese are pushing 1990s DUV technology to the limit through the «multipatterning» technique, which makes it possible to create finer patterns by repeating the process several times. David Lin, a senior adviser at the Special Competitive Studies Project, confirms it: «They're going to take DUV to its absolute limits.» In parallel, the impossibility of accessing the most advanced Nvidia chips has pushed China to innovate on the software side, developing lighter and more efficient language models, such as DeepSeek, that require less computing power.

**Startups on the prowl**

Beyond China, there are also Western startups that want to compete with ASML. The one most mentioned in the article is Substrate, co-founded by James Proud, which aims to create lithography machines that are cheaper, smaller, and potentially more capable than ASML's behemoths. The premise is that the extreme market concentration and astronomical prices create an opportunity for alternative solutions, although the article does not go into technical detail on how Substrate intends to achieve this.

**The technology roadmap: another decade of Moore**

The promise ASML makes to the AI ecosystem is clear: high-NA EUV should make it possible to keep shrinking transistor size for at least another decade. «We can allow customers to go to ever smaller features, and that opens up the space for everything we're seeing today in AI, which is absolutely mind-blowing,» says Pieters. «I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.» For the chip industry, which has spent decades eyeing the end of Moore's law, the message is reassuring: miniaturization will continue, performance will keep growing, and the AI arms race has technological fuel for a long while yet.

**Conclusion: the giant and its challengers**

The article ends with a reflection that runs throughout the text: technology monopolies can be toppled with the right trick. ASML knows this well: it was the company that dethroned Nikon and Canon by betting on EUV when no one else would. Now, with an unprecedented dominant position and a $400 million machine that no one else can build, the challenge is staying on top while China spends without limit to catch up and well-funded startups try to outflank it. The immediate future indisputably belongs to ASML, but as its own engineers know better than anyone, in the industry of light and mirrors a new idea can change everything.