ASML

Every single iPhone, every single AI model that you use could not exist without a machine that these guys make. It's the world's biggest secret monopoly. Let me tell you why. To understand ASML's chip market monopoly, you have to understand how silicon microchips are made. To make a chip, you channel light through a machine onto a wafer to etch a circuit pattern. The shorter the light wavelength, the more intricate the design. The more intricate the design, the more powerful the chip. Over the years, we've moved from visible light to make chips in the 60s and 70s, to UV light in the 80s, to deep UV light in the 90s. Then, in the late 90s, as computing exploded, we needed something more powerful to keep pace, extreme ultraviolet light. EUV is really difficult to direct. You have to fire a laser 50,000 times a second at droplets of molten tin with heat that's 40 times the temperature of the sun. In 1997, the US made the biggest bet to build EUV technology. Intel and others put $250 million in. But when it came time to actually build the machine, major company walked away. It was too hard, too expensive, too uncertain. So a little Dutch company called ASML, that started with 47 in a leaky shed, took it on instead. For 15 years, they worked on this difficult problem without any guarantee of success. Then in 2012, the project became so expensive that Intel, TSMC, and Samsung did something almost unheard of. They invested $6 billion directly into ASML as shareholders, not customers. The three biggest chip companies on Earth needed much that they wrote checks to keep this machine alive. The first commercial EUV machine shipped in 2018, 21 years after they started. It weighs 180 tons, the size of a school bus, 100,000 parts from 800 suppliers. To ship it to a customer takes three 747s. It costs $200 million. ASML only makes 50 a year, and they ship them all over the world, except China. ASML has never sold a single EUV machine to China. There's been an export ban since 2019. China actually saw this coming. In 2024, they went on a buying spree of ASML's older machines, ones that use deep UV instead, and became 49% of ASML's total revenue, not even for their best product. Lately, restrictions have kicked in and global demand has risen, that number has dropped to 20% last year. ASML's EUV machine, the one that nobody else has on, has now created a $400 billion market cap, 100% market share, basically zero competitors. Now it's central to a new kind of global arms race. Whoever controls this machine controls the future of computing. And right now, ASML does.