A company unknown to the general public, based in a small village in the Netherlands, is working behind the scenes on the artificial intelligence revolution.
Thanks to its dominance in the lithography systems used to produce the world’s most advanced chips, ASML is now Europe’s largest company by market value.
The largest semiconductor manufacturers – such as Intel in the US, TSMC in Taiwan, Micron in the US and SK Hynix in South Korea – are among the buyers of the huge machines, which sell for more than $250 million each.
ASML currently controls 90% of the global lithography equipment market. Nvidia, a pioneer in artificial intelligence equipment, is one of the companies that depends on its technology.
Monopoly
Lithography machines use narrow beams of light to etch patterns onto wafers of silicon that have been coated with photosensitive chemicals.
And the shorter the wavelength of the light, the smaller the resulting patterns. This miniaturization increases the number of transistors that can fit on each chip.
For this reason, the semiconductor industry has long used machines that use ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength than visible light.
But ASML is the only company in the world that produces ultra-high-energy ultraviolet (EUV) machines, whose radiation has a wavelength of just 13 nanometers.
By comparison, a human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick.
EUV machines, the size of a bus, rely on complex arrangements of lasers, mirrors and magnets.
Divided into sections, each machine requires 40 shipping containers to transport, which are loaded onto Boeing 747 planes for delivery to customers.
At the heart of the machine, powerful lasers vaporize droplets of molten tin that are fired 50,000 times a second. The superheated, vaporized metal emits ultraviolet light at 13 nanometers.
Then, a system of mirrors manufactured by the German company Carl Zeiss, with surfaces smoother than even the mirrors of space telescopes, directs the ultraviolet rays into the interior of the machine.
The surge in demand for chips driven by investments in artificial intelligence has brought profits to ASML, based in Veldhoven, Netherlands.
The company has seen its share price double since last April and rise by 25% this month alone.
Its market capitalization recently surpassed $500 billion.
While ASML faces competition in the DUV (deep ultraviolet) market from Japan’s Nikon and Canon and China’s SMEE, experts estimate that its dominance in advanced chips will continue for years, despite efforts by China and the United States to catch up.
