This Dutch company is the invisible force behind the AI revolution. They don’t make chips, they make the machines that make the chips. And without those machines, there’d be no advanced processors from TSMC, no cutting-edge GPUs from Nvidia, and no AI models running on them.

ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems are feats of engineering. Each one costs up to $200 million, weighs as much as 30 elephants, and requires three Boeing 747s just to ship. The precision is mind-blowing, if one of their mirrors were scaled to the size of the U.S., its biggest flaw would be the height of a grain of sand.

Back in the ’80s, ASML was a struggling Philips spin-off company. While others played it safe, they bet everything on EUV tech, a gamble so risky that no one else dared. Now, they’re the only company in the world that can do this, and chipmakers line up to pay whatever it takes.

They only ship about 50 of these machines a year, but that’s all the market gets. And with Q1 2025 revenue hitting €7.7 billion (over half from EUV), they’re not just supplying the industry they’re holding the keys to it.

So while the big names grab headlines, remember: AI’s future is being printed in a Dutch lab, one nanometer at a time.

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