ASMLWide moat

ASML makes the machines that make chips possible. Every advanced semiconductor on earth — every AI accelerator, every phone processor — is printed by lithography, and at the leading edge the printing is done by exactly one company's machines: ASML's extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) systems, of which it is the world's sole maker. The business model is two-sided: sell a small number of enormous machines at enormous prices — a standard EUV system runs about €200 million and up, the new High-NA generation roughly €350 million¹ — and then service, upgrade and re-sell capability into every machine already standing in a fab, essentially forever.

The money map surprises people who know only the monopoly headline. Of 2025's €32.7 billion in net sales², EUV systems billed €11.6 billion — but the older deep-ultraviolet (DUV) machines, the workhorses that print the majority of every chip's layers and most of the world's mature silicon, billed slightly more, €12.0 billion. Metrology and inspection added €0.8 billion. And the quiet engine is the Installed Base business — service contracts, productivity software and upgrades on the thousand-plus systems already in the field — which grew 25% to €8.2 billion, a quarter of the company that recurs regardless of the capex cycle.

The customer list is short enough to memorize: only TSMC, Samsung and Intel buy the leading edge, and a handful of memory and Chinese mature-node makers buy the rest. That concentration cuts both ways — three buyers hold real negotiating weight, yet each depends existentially on ASML's roadmap, and they queue years ahead: the order backlog stood at €38.8 billion entering 2026.

The AI build-out has turned the dial to its richest setting. Second-quarter 2026 sales reached €9.3 billion at a 54% gross margin, and full-year guidance — raised twice in six months as fab plans accelerated — now sits at €43-45 billion³, against €32.7 billion just reported. The market has noticed: at roughly €569 billion, ASML trades near 53 times trailing earnings⁴, a multiple that assumes the AI capex wave rolls on and the monopoly keeps renewing itself.

Those two assumptions are exactly what the rest of these pages examine: The Moat weighs the monopoly, the physics, the Zeiss partnership and the annuity; the Future Bets track High-NA's first products, the new packaging beachhead, the €1.3 billion Mistral wager and the Hyper-NA machine of the 2030s. A toll road is only as good as its traffic — and its next extension. Each of the four product lines is taken in turn in The Revenue Lines.