tech
Printing the tiniest features on today's most advanced chips requires extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, and only one company on Earth can build them.
ASML of the Netherlands is the sole manufacturer of EUV lithography machines, the only tools capable of printing the tiniest, most advanced features on today's leading-edge chips, which makes the company a single critical chokepoint that the entire global semiconductor industry depends on.
TSMC is a leading chip foundry that actually uses ASML's EUV machines to manufacture chips, but it does not build the machines itself. Nvidia designs chips, particularly for AI, but likewise doesn't manufacture the lithography equipment used to produce them.
Each EUV machine costs hundreds of millions of dollars and is assembled from hundreds of thousands of precision parts, requiring a small fleet of cargo planes and truck convoys just to ship one unit to a customer's factory, making it one of the most complex machines ever built for commercial use.
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