As the new Bloomberg profile of the Dutch Lithography Giant ASML says, the global economy is counting on the consolidation of one monopoly to shoot lasers at tin drops again, but do it better this time.
To be clear, the legal perspective on monopolies does not mean that everyone in the market is a villain. If a firm is simply making a very large product, and running the table economically on that rule alone, the anti-gambling rule should not kick in and break that firm for doing a good job. As previously mentioned by Gizmodo, ASML does a magic trick that, until now, no one else can.
But AI monopolies are absurdly abuquitous. Nvidia famously dominates the Data Center GPUS market, and has been cleared by the US COPS of Antitrust. Only 10% of the AI GPU market is owned by other companies.
ASML’s Monopoly makes Nvidia’s appearance almost invisible. Bloomberg frames asml as a bottleneck that AI flows through, because it is. If you want to make the most advanced AI chips, you need ASML lithography equipment, and don’t take it seriously because it doesn’t exist. Bloomberg describes ASML’s chokehold on premium lithography in dark terms
I can’t fully explain how the absurd technology exists, because I’m not an engineer, but if you’ve ever heard it, because you’ve seen the coverage of bad news for $400, it’s sent to an airline source dedicated to airplanes. And maybe you’ve heard that these machines work by shooting lasers at airborne, microscopic auv droplets that produce EUV light on GPUs that are used to train and operate AI systems.
So for the most part, Nvidia designs them, and TSMC supports them with ASML equipment
But there is a contradiction in the profession of Bloomberg, because Christomer Fouquet’s “The Next Big Experiment as written by Bloomberg, ASML evolves to reach new levels of combination of the process under As always, little means high performance at low temperatures and with little power required.
But it cannot be compared to how much economic ‘heat’ is focused on this bright shining point.
In some ways, Asml’s products are a global economy right now. A recent New York Times report describes the “Tractor Tractor” economy where “everything tied to artificial intelligence is rising” While everything else is solid, shrinking, or at least less attractive. AI—or more specifically, investors throwing money at AI—is almost the only thing that will get companies to do things like build and hire people.
The transformation of ASML and Fouquet’s “High NA” is a company going through a new product cycle, sure, but in a sense, ASML feels like the last remaining lug holding the remaining wheel. And the truck has everyone in the world’s economy safe inside it.
