How does a single company in a Dutch town of roughly 48,000 people build the only machines able to print the world’s most advanced chips, with its newest model costing about €350 million?

The company is ASML, and the answer is that it does not build these machines alone. From its headquarters in Veldhoven, a Dutch municipality with approximately 47,700 residents, ASML coordinates thousands of specialised suppliers, integrates their components and installs the finished systems inside the world’s most advanced chip factories. Its newest generation, known as High-NA EUV, costs approximately €350 million per machine.

ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography systems use light to project intricate patterns onto silicon wafers. Those patterns eventually become the transistors and connections inside processors used in advanced smartphones, data centres and artificial-intelligence accelerators. No other company currently sells production-ready EUV lithography machines commercially.

That can make ASML’s position look like the result of one closely guarded invention. In reality, its advantage rests on thousands of interdependent technologies spread across Europe, the United States and Asia. Veldhoven is where those technologies are made to function as one machine.

ASML survived by refusing to build everything itself

ASML was established as ASM Lithography on April 1, 1984, as a joint venture between Philips and ASM International. Its original purpose was to commercialise a wafer stepper developed at Philips, according to the company’s detailed account of its founding. The young company entered a market in which established Japanese manufacturers such as Nikon and Canon were already formidable competitors.

The early operation was small, financially constrained and uncertain of its place in the industry. ASML could not afford to reproduce every component of a lithography system within its own walls. It instead concentrated on the architecture of the complete machine and relied on outside companies for many of its most specialised parts.

What began as a necessity eventually became one of the company’s greatest strengths. ASML says its machines contain thousands of parts, most of which are made by suppliers, and that its ecosystem now includes approximately 5,000 partners and suppliers. Its 2025 annual report placed the total supplier count at 5,100.

These companies do not simply receive a finished drawing and manufacture an interchangeable component. Many work alongside ASML engineers for years to develop technologies that exist almost entirely for use inside its machines. A change to one component can force adjustments across several other systems.

ASML therefore operates less like an ordinary manufacturer and more like the architect of a vast industrial network. It manufactures important components, performs final integration and writes much of the control software, but its deeper skill is making technologies produced by separate companies behave as one system.

The light begins with a falling drop of tin

Lithography is the stage of chip manufacturing in which patterns are projected onto a silicon wafer coated with light-sensitive material. The exposed pattern is developed and processed, helping to form one layer of the billions of transistors and electrical connections within a modern chip. The process is repeated many times as successive layers are built and aligned.

The size of the patterns that can be produced depends partly on the wavelength of the light. Earlier deep ultraviolet systems use light with a wavelength of 193 nanometres. Chipmakers have extended that technology through immersion, multiple patterning and other techniques, but the most intricate layers of leading-edge chips demanded a much shorter wavelength.

ASML’s EUV systems use light measuring 13.5 nanometres. This light does not come from an ordinary bulb or a conventional industrial laser. The machine has to generate a usable stream of EUV light continuously while processing wafers quickly enough for commercial manufacturing.

Inside the light source, a generator releases microscopic droplets of molten tin into a vacuum chamber. A first laser pulse reshapes each droplet, then a second pulse strikes it with enough energy to create a plasma that emits EUV radiation. ASML describes the droplets as being about 25 micrometres wide and travelling at approximately 70 metres per second.

The process is repeated tens of thousands of times every second. Each droplet has to arrive at the correct point at precisely the right moment, while heat, debris and contamination are controlled around it. A small loss of light or a mistimed pulse can reduce the speed of a machine on which an entire production line depends.

The optics must work without glass or air

Generating EUV light is only the first difficulty. Light at this wavelength is absorbed by air and by most materials, including the glass used in conventional lenses. The light path must therefore operate in a near vacuum, and the system must use mirrors instead of lenses to direct the beam.

Those mirrors are produced by ZEISS Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology in Oberkochen, Germany. They contain more than 100 extremely thin layers designed to reflect as much 13.5-nanometre light as possible. ZEISS describes them as the most precise mirrors in the world.

The scale comparison is almost absurd. ZEISS says that if the surface of one of its EUV mirrors were enlarged to the size of Germany, its largest irregularity would be approximately one tenth of a millimetre high. An imperfection that would be meaningless in most machines could distort the pattern projected onto a chip.

The mirrors are mounted inside a complex optical system that illuminates the mask and projects its pattern onto the wafer. EUV light loses energy at every reflection, so the shape, coating and position of each mirror matter. The machine continuously measures and corrects its own behaviour as temperatures, movements and operating conditions change.

The partnership between ASML and ZEISS stretches back decades. ASML does not simply order a finished optical unit from a catalogue. The two companies jointly develop optics, measurement systems, mounting structures and controls that must operate as an inseparable part of the lithography platform.

Veldhoven is where thousands of tolerances meet

The light-source technology comes from Cymer in San Diego, which ASML acquired in 2013 to accelerate the development of EUV. ZEISS supplies the optical system from Germany. Other companies contribute vacuum equipment, lasers, sensors, cables, precision bearings, control electronics and specialised materials.

Each component can be extraordinary in isolation and still fail when placed inside the complete machine. A more powerful light source produces additional heat. Heat can alter the position of an optical component, while a microscopic change in position can affect the alignment between different layers of a chip.

Veldhoven is where ASML integrates these dependencies. Engineers assemble major modules, test how they interact and write the software that coordinates light generation, mask movement, wafer positioning, temperature, pressure and vibration. The behaviour of a part can change once it is connected to everything around it.

The wafer stage must move rapidly while maintaining nanometre-level accuracy. Sensors measure its position, while control systems make continuous corrections. At the same time, another part of the machine may be measuring the next wafer so that production can continue without unnecessary pauses.

ASML’s continuing growth has placed enormous pressure on the wider Eindhoven region. Silicon Canals has reported on the company’s plans to explore a major expansion in Eindhoven, alongside Dutch government investments intended to improve housing, transport, education and infrastructure around the technology cluster.

Why another company cannot simply copy the machine

A competitor could study the broad architecture of an EUV lithography system. The underlying principles of plasma generation, reflective optics and wafer exposure are publicly understood. The barrier is turning those principles into a machine that can operate reliably for years while processing large numbers of wafers every day.

ASML and its suppliers have accumulated decades of experiments, failures and production data. Their engineers know which materials deform after repeated heating, which coatings deteriorate under particular conditions and which vibrations appear only after thousands of hours of operation. Much of that knowledge is embedded in software, manufacturing procedures and the experience of individual teams.

A new competitor would also need to reproduce the surrounding industrial network. It would need its own source of EUV mirrors, a stable high-power light source, specialised stages, vacuum systems, sensors and thousands of supporting components. Solving one missing problem would not be enough if the other parts could not be integrated with the same accuracy.

Support after delivery matters almost as much as the original machine. Chipmakers require replacement parts, upgrades and engineers who can respond quickly when a system stops performing correctly. A machine costing hundreds of millions of euros cannot sit idle while a distant manufacturer works out how to repair it.

The €350 million machine raises the difficulty again

ASML’s newest EUV platform increases the numerical aperture of its optical system from 0.33 to 0.55. The technology is called High-NA EUV, with NA referring to numerical aperture. The higher figure gives the system greater resolution, allowing chipmakers to print smaller features and potentially reduce the number of production steps required for some patterns.

The redesigned platform requires substantially larger optics, faster stages and new ways of exposing patterns on a wafer. ASML says its High-NA systems can print features with a resolution of eight nanometres and support future advanced logic and memory processes. The company explains the changes in its current guide to High-NA EUV lithography.

ASML shipped the first modules of its first High-NA system before the end of 2023. The company confirmed the milestone in its fourth-quarter financial results. Intel was the first customer to receive the new platform and has since taken delivery of additional equipment.

The approximately €350 million price does not represent hardware alone. It also reflects decades of research, custom manufacturing capacity, software development, supplier investment and the infrastructure required to install and support the system. After delivery, customers must still develop masks, materials and production processes around it.

The scale of the business shows how valuable that capability has become. Silicon Canals reported that ASML generated €7.7 billion in sales during the second quarter of 2025, with €2.3 billion in bookings connected to EUV technology. The company’s 2025 annual revenue later reached €32.7 billion.

This is how one company in a relatively small Dutch municipality came to control such an important industrial capability. ASML did not collect every necessary skill inside a single factory. It constructed a network in which thousands of specialists solve separate parts of the same physical problem, while Veldhoven remains the place where those parts are forced to agree.

For now, the machines continue to leave the Netherlands in separate modules before being rebuilt inside semiconductor factories in the United States, Europe and Asia. Each will spend years being calibrated, monitored, repaired and upgraded. Some of the smallest patterns ever manufactured still begin with falling drops of tin, mirrors polished almost beyond imagination and a machine assembled in a Dutch municipality of roughly 48,000 people.