Extreme ultraviolet lithography, the process that prints the finest patterns on a chip. One Dutch company, ASML, makes every EUV lithography machine in production. Chapters 5, 7.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 5 — The Island in Every Machine
Why every accelerator runs through Taiwan: the foundry, the packaging and the memory that are booked years ahead, and what that does to anyone arriving late with cash.
- Chapter 7 — The Double Blockade
Two governments deciding one trade: Washington’s export rules and Beijing’s instructions at the border, and what each did to the chip business it meant to shape.
Sources that use it
- Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (Scribner, 2022) (the choke-point arithmetic Miller printed in 2022, on 2019 data: Taiwan 37 percent of what he called the world’s new computing power, a share of logic wafer capacity in the report his note cites; two Korean firms 44 percent of memory; ASML 100 percent of EUV lithography — “OPEC’s 40 percent share of world oil production looks unimpressive by comparison”; an advanced logic fab “costs twice as much as an aircraft carrier but will only be cutting-edge for a couple of years”; the foreign-direct-product rule against Huawei, which Miller dates to May 2020 though its reach to any chip sold to Huawei is the rule of August 2020 — any chip made anywhere with US technology requires US permission; a former senior official afterward: “Weaponized interdependence… It’s a beautiful thing”; TSMC founded 1987 with the state providing 48 percent of the capital — “a project of the Taiwanese state”; on EUV: “wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized” (ch. 32, “Lithography Wars”, its last paragraph); on the industry’s paradox, a U.S. semiconductor executive to a White House official: “Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor” (ch. 49, Everything We’re Competing On); Introduction, of the choke points: “No other facet of the economy is so dependent on so few firms”). Also ch. “The Next Offset”: “One Chinese study has estimated that as many as 95 percent of GPUs in Chinese servers running artificial intelligence workloads are designed by Nvidia” — a cited study’s figure, which the study itself (CAICT, 2021, p. 15) gives as about 95 percent of China’s AI-server market in 2020, a market share and a central figure, not an upper bound, not Miller’s own count (the “in the car with us” line is Matt Turpin’s argument as Miller reports it; the 95 percent figure is a Chinese study Miller cites; Miller’s endnote dates the 37 percent to 2019 Semiconductor Industry Association data and sources the 44 percent to the same report). In the Sources
- ASML, “ASML reports €11.7 billion total net sales and €5.0 billion net income in Q3 2026,” results release, 14 October 2026 (“we now expect that our supply as currently planned for both 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet the demand of our customers”; “we are investigating ways to increase capacity for 2028 beyond the 30% increase we previously communicated”; the footnote’s plan, from its release of the second quarter, to “increase 2026 low NA EUV and DUV immersion capacity by 30% in 2027”; the company “provides chipmakers with hardware, software and services to mass produce the patterns of integrated circuits”; a supplier’s forecast of its own supply, not a record of a delayed delivery). In the Sources
- TSMC, first-quarter 2024 earnings call transcript, 18 April 2024 (the 3 April Hualien earthquake: more than 70 percent of tools recovered within ten hours, all tools by the end of the third day, no damage to EUV equipment, some wafers scrapped, about 50 basis points off second-quarter gross margin; priority is customers’ success regardless of which customer; OSATs as a complement to TSMC’s own advanced-packaging expansion; C. C. Wei in prepared remarks: “We forecast the revenue contribution from server AI processors to more than double this year and account for low-teens percent of our total revenue in 2024”; C. C. Wei on CoWoS capacity, answering an analyst: “the demand is very, very strong, and we have done our best where we put all the effort to increase the capacity. It’s probably more than double this year as compared with last year. However, it’s still not enough to meet the customers’ demand, and we leverage our OSAT partners to complement of TSMC’s capacity to fulfill our customers’ need.”; C. C. Wei on how CoWoS capacity is allocated: “my first priority is to make our customer to be successful, no matter which one. And of course, the long-term partners will have a better cooperation with TSMC in terms of technology and process complexity, so much easier to be ramped up”). In the Sources
- SK hynix Inc., prospectus filed pursuant to Rule 424(b)(4), Registration No. 333-296987, dated 9 July 2026 and filed 10 July 2026 (177,900,000 ADSs, each one-tenth of a common share, at US$149.00 per ADS; approved for listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as “SKHY”; no over-allotment option, under Korean law; net proceeds “for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures”; cornerstone investors Baillie Gifford, Coatue and Situational Awareness Partners LP indicated interest in up to $7 billion in aggregate; its use of proceeds: “capital expenditures of W 45.5 trillion related to the construction of our production facilities in Korea”, Fab 1 at the Yongin complex and the P&T7 advanced packaging plant at Cheongju, and EUV scanners expected to “cost approximately W 11.9 trillion and receive delivery by December 2027”; “We began construction of our first fab at the Yongin complex in February 2025 with the phase 1 cleanroom of the first fab expected to open in the first quarter of 2027”; P&T7 “expect to complete construction by the end of 2027”; of supply: “Specific quantities and pricing are typically determined through mutual agreement at the time of purchase, taking into account market conditions and demand”; key customers “may reduce quantities purchased, delay or cancel purchase orders or elect to terminate their business relationship with us at any time”; of customers, “strong long-term relationships with our key customers”, no long-term agreement with one described; “To the extent that current industry demand reflects inventory accumulation, actual end-market demand for our products may be lower than current order trends suggest”; of the Indiana plant: “expect to commence operations in the second half of 2028”; the “Cornerstone Investors,” Baillie Gifford, Coatue and Situational Awareness Partners LP, had “indicated an interest in purchasing up to an aggregate of US$7 billion” of the ADSs; its profit-sharing: “In addition, we operate a profit-sharing incentive program linked to our operating results, which utilizes 10% of our operating profit as determined under the Korean International Financial Reporting Standards”). In the Sources
- Fanny Potkin, “EXCLUSIVE: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips,” Reuters, 17 December 2025 (a prototype EUV machine completed in early 2025 in a high-security Shenzhen laboratory by former ASML engineers working under aliases, according to two people with knowledge of the project; operational and generating extreme ultraviolet light, no working chips yet; the culmination of a six-year government initiative, under the semiconductor strategy state media identify as run by Ding Xuexiang, head of the Communist Party’s Central Science and Technology Commission, with Huawei coordinating companies and state research institutes; precision optics of the kind Carl Zeiss supplies to ASML the main obstacle; government target of working chips by 2028, 2030 called more realistic by those close to the project; ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet in April 2025: China would need “many, many years”). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “EUV.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/euv (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-euv-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{EUV}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/euv},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}