ASML Says AI Boom Lifts Demand as EUV Capacity Sells Out Through 2027

ASML Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen said the artificial intelligence boom has fundamentally changed customer sentiment, speaking at the groundbreaking of the company's new factory in Eindhoven. Capacity for its extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, priced at about 200 million euros each, is almost sold out through 2027. At the same time, customers have made successive commitments to adopt its next-generation High NA equipment, priced at about 400 million US dollars per unit. Dassen described the tone of a recent conversation with a major customer as: can you give us more, and can you deliver sooner. Customer timelines have gradually come into focus. TSMC has committed to adopting High NA technology from 2030. Samsung said it will begin using High NA equipment for memory chip production in 2028. Memory maker SK Hynix also announced it will use High NA from 2028. Micron has ordered equipment but has not yet set a production date. As the first adopter of the technology, Intel said on September 8, 2026, that it had processed more than 1 million wafers with High NA tools. Disclosed alongside these timelines was an industry initiative to push the decades-old 6-inch photomask standard toward 12 inches. Existing EUV equipment has a maximum single-chip exposure area of about 800 square millimeters, and large data center chip designs are approaching that limit. High NA, because it uses a smaller mask, has a more restricted exposable area. Expanding the mask size would allow the new generation of equipment to produce products comparable to today's largest data center chips. ASML Chief Technology Officer Marco Pieters said that if the industry can achieve this transition, equipment productivity would rise by 40%. The initiative plans to build a pilot line by 2031 and reach volume-production readiness by 2033. Commercial progress is already supported by data. Greet Storms, a senior vice president at ASML, disclosed that as of mid-July 2026, High NA EUV systems worldwide had exposed a cumulative total of more than 1.35 million wafers. The certified EXE:5200B system reached a throughput of 135 wafers per hour in acceptance testing, an increase of 35% from the previous-generation EXE:5000's 100 wafers per hour. Intel has already used High NA in volume production of some Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake, on its 18A process node, and its Oregon production line has completed dual certification. On orders, ASML disclosed in July 2026 that orders for the EUV equipment it needs in 2027 have been essentially fully secured, and it has received a large batch of forward EUV orders for 2028. The company plans to raise capacity for Low-NA EUV and immersion DUV equipment by 30% in each of 2027 and 2028. Its full-year 2026 revenue guidance has been raised to 43 billion to 45 billion euros. Discussion of artificial intelligence safety also intensified over the same period. On September 12, 2026, local time, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said the company would introduce more safeguards, including independent third-party evaluations, and urged the industry to slow the development of the most advanced models. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman expressed support, and xAI's Elon Musk responded that Dario was right. In after-hours trading on the evening of September 13, Beijing time, chip stocks fell collectively: SK Hynix and Intel dropped 4%, Micron Technology, AMD and SanDisk fell 3%, and Nvidia declined 2%. Oracle's first-quarter capital expenditure was 28.5 billion US dollars, exceeding its total revenue for the quarter. Capital spending by the four largest US cloud service providers rose 86% year on year in the second quarter, and TrendForce has raised its 2026 capital expenditure estimate for the nine largest cloud vendors to 886.7 billion US dollars. In addition, Anthropic is in talks to bring in Nvidia as a cornerstone investor, in a fundraising of up to 100 billion US dollars that could value the company at 2 trillion US dollars.