EUV: Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography
The technology so hard to build that only one company in the world makes it
Imagine a single tool so difficult to build that after decades of research and tens of billions of dollars of investment across the entire global industry, exactly one company on Earth has managed to manufacture a commercially working version. That is EUV lithography, and it is arguably the closest thing the modern global economy has to a genuine technological monopoly.
EUV uses light at an extremely short wavelength, roughly 13.5 nanometres, to print far finer circuit patterns onto silicon than older lithography technology allows, making it essential for manufacturing the most advanced chips, generally those at the 7 nanometre node and below. Generating that light reliably, at industrial scale and precision, required solving problems in optics, plasma physics and precision engineering that took the industry the better part of two decades to crack.
ASML, the Dutch company that eventually succeeded, now holds a functional monopoly on EUV equipment, and each machine costs well over 100 million dollars, takes months to install and calibrate, and requires an entire ecosystem of specialised suppliers just to keep running. No chipmaker anywhere, no matter how well funded, can simply build a competing leading-edge chip manufacturing capability without access to ASML's machines.
This concentration has made EUV a direct lever of geopolitical policy. Export restrictions, coordinated primarily by the Netherlands and the United States, have deliberately limited which countries and companies can purchase EUV systems, using this single chokepoint to slow specific nations' ability to manufacture the most advanced chips domestically, regardless of how much domestic chip design or fabrication investment those countries otherwise make.
Whenever a country's chip fabrication ambitions are described as capped at a mature process node rather than the industry's cutting edge, EUV access restrictions are frequently the concrete, physical reason, no amount of capital or policy intent can substitute for a machine that only one supplier in the world is currently permitted to sell them.