The most consequential machine of the AI boom is not a server. It is a lithography tool called High-NA EUV, built by ASML of Veldhoven in the Netherlands, and when the first one left for Intel's fab in Oregon it travelled in 250 crates packed into 43 freight containers aboard a small fleet of cargo aircraft. Reassembled over months in a cleanroom, the 165-tonne machine costs around $380m, the most expensive production tool ever sold to chipmakers. The invoice buys the ability to draw the transistors of the coming decade: features roughly eight nanometres across, a few dozen atoms wide, printed by the billion. Every serious forecast of AI compute runs through machines like this one, and exactly one company on earth makes them.
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