The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking

Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.

It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a futuristic V8 engine. When I reach the top with Benschop we’re looking down from about 15 feet in the air, with bunny-suited technicians scurrying around below.

It’s more than 200 cubic meters of tech—“mechatronic devices that hold a few mirrors in a position with atomic precision,” he says, gesturing at the gargantuan apparatus. Benschop, a tall and grizzled 66-year-old, has spent over a decade working with his engineers to design this thing, but even so, he’ll sometimes look at it and go: Oh my God.

Benschop is the executive vice president of technology for ASML, a Dutch company that is the linchpin of the microchip industry. If you want to make powerful chips to power phones or AI, a lithography machine like the one we’re standing on is what you need to create increasingly tiny circuitry. Lithography is the art and science of shining light on a silicon wafer to pattern out the transistors, wiring, and other components of the microchips that will be cut from it.

The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant.

Nine years ago, ASML began selling machines that use a daring new way of patterning chip features. These machines employ extreme-ultraviolet light, or EUV—radiation well outside the visible spectrum that they produce by shooting lasers at tiny molten drops of tin, tens of thousands of times a second. Those first machines—the result of an R&D moonshot that lasted 16 years and cost about $10 billion—can craft transistor features with a resolution of 13 nanometers. This new machine can do even better: It has a resolution of just eight nanometers, the width of about 40 silicon atoms. The devices are now shipping to chipmaking factories, or fabs, at an eye-watering price: $400 million each.

But chipmakers will fork that cash over, because they are in a desperate race to produce new and improved chips every year. That means getting their mitts on machines that can make ever smaller components and cram them together ever more densely—part of a long-standing recipe for creating faster and more energy-efficient chips.

For years now, ASML’s tools have been critical to keeping Moore’s Law alive. Without the company’s advanced chipmaking technology it is very possible that chip density—and the ability to perform ever more calculations—would have plateaued.

The AI industry has produced new and ravenous demand for denser chips, as firms like OpenAI and Anthropic scramble to erect server farms that train and deploy new, ever-more-powerful models, which require new, ever-more-powerful hardware. ASML’s latest machine promises to help keep the AI party raging for at least another decade.

“We can allow customers to go to smaller and smaller features, and that opens up the space for whatever we see now today in AI, which is absolutely mind-blowing,” Marco Pieters, ASML’s CTO, told me. “I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.”

Its relentless push for “shrink”—as they call it in the chipmaking industry—has made ASML a dominant force: The company produces about 90% of all chip-lithography tools worldwide. If you make chips, ASML is unavoidable.

But that monopoly position makes some people, and governments, uneasy. The chipmaking field is essentially controlled by only two big players: ASML, which creates the lithography machines, and TSMC, the chipmaking giant in Taiwan, which uses ASML’s machines to craft the vast majority of all microchips. This duopoly is so powerful that it has geopolitical implications. In an effort to prevent China from developing advanced AI, the US government pressured the Dutch government to impose an embargo in 2019: ASML isn’t allowed to sell high-end machines to any Chinese firm. Geopolitically, “chips are the new oil,” says Marc Hijink, the author of Focus: The ASML Way. Being deprived of them can be as disastrous as being deprived of oil. And in that metaphor, you might say, ASML is the Strait of Hormuz.

James Proud, the cofounder and CEO of the lithography startup Substrate, says the situation is not ideal. The US is “dangerously reliant” on a supply chain that’s overseas and increasingly pricey, Substrate says on its website. “There’s a huge concentration in a small number of players,” Proud says. “And the supply chain is just very expensive.”

Which is why, after two decades of ASML’s dominance, would-be competitors are now gunning for its territory. China is hungrily pouring billions into trying to replicate ASML’s tech. And startups like Substrate are trying to get in the game as well, setting their sights on creating lithography machines that are cheaper, smaller, and even more capable than ASML’s behemoths. Will any of them succeed? The near future clearly belongs to ASML, but as its engineers well know, you can unseat a giant with the right trick of the light.

Making chips is, oddly, a bit like silk-screening a T-shirt. To print a pattern on a silicon wafer, you start with a pattern on a reticle—a mask that carries the design. Shining a light on the reticle transfers that pattern to the wafer. The light interacts with a layer of chemicals on the wafer, fixing the pattern in place.

The size of a chip’s features is partly set by the wavelength of light the machine uses: The smaller the wavelength, the teensier the circuitry you can create. You can stretch the capabilities of a wavelength somewhat; increasing what’s known as the numerical aperture, which usually means swapping in a bigger lens, can further focus the light and thus lay down patterns for smaller and smaller components. Eventually, though, this trick hits its limit, and you need to find a new form of light with a smaller wavelength.

So the history of chipmaking has been a two-step dance. The industry finds a good source of light, eventually increases the numerical aperture, and then finally accepts the need for a smaller wavelength, starting the two-step all over again. Up to the early 1990s, chipmakers used visible light, with a wavelength of about 400 nanometers. By the mid-’90s they’d upgraded to deep ultraviolet, ultimately getting it down to a 193-nanometer wavelength. By the late ’90s they saw the end of the line approaching for deep ultraviolet. But what would come next?

All the options were troublesome. They could shift to x-rays, with a teensy one-nanometer wavelength, but they were devilishly hard to focus. Beams of electrons and ions were equally precise; but they worked like dot-matrix printers, transferring a pattern point by point, which was far too slow. (The chip industry wants a machine to crank out hundreds of wafers per hour.)

Jeff Koch, analyst, SemiAnalysis

“It’s a very engineering-heavy company:Let’s send thousands of engineers and just have them mow down these problems.That’s what they did, and it worked.”

Around 2001, ASML, then a smaller player in the lithography world, placed its bet on another option: EUV, with a wavelength just shy of the x-ray range. Nikon and Canon were working on it as well, but they dropped out—while ASML kept going. The idea was full of unknowns. Nobody knew how to reliably generate that type of light, nor how to focus it; EUV is absorbed by regular glass lenses. It’s even absorbed by air. ASML figured it would take six full years to wade through this R&D nightmare.

In reality it took those 16 years and about $10 billion in research, but it worked. The machine, which works in a vacuum, creates EUV light by vaporizing molten tin and using mirrors to direct it. Zeiss, a historic German optics company, had to invent new techniques for polishing and inspecting the mirrors, us