April 9, 2021
The world is running short of semiconductor chips—running so short that Subaru has temporarily closed a plant in Japan, 5G network rollouts are delayed, Apple is worried about production hiccups, and new PlayStation 5s are nearly impossible to find. The reason for the shortfall may be plain to see—production slowdowns during the pandemic, compounded by booming demand for consumer technology—but the shortfall itself shows the stunning ubiquity of the chip today, and the dense complexity of the supply chains that produce it.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that a single Dutch company sits at the very heart of this $439 billion industry. At its headquarters in Veldhoven, in the Netherlands, ASML assembles photolithography machines, which etch circuit patterns onto chip wafers using low-wavelength light. Other companies make such machines too, but ASML controls more than 60% of the market; in 2019, its revenue was 11.8 billion euros ($13.2 billion). It is also the only manufacturer of the latest, most precise generation of chip-making machines, which uses extreme ultraviolet light (EUV), with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers—a ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.