How Chips Are Made
The Machine That Only One Company on Earth Knows How to Build
Every advanced chip in your phone, your laptop, and every AI server on the planet was made using a machine so complex that its instruction manual runs to 4,000 pages — and only one company in the world can manufacture it.
The Idea
Semiconductors are made through a process called photolithography — essentially, printing microscopic circuit patterns onto silicon using light. The logic is elegant: coat a silicon wafer in a light-sensitive chemical, shine a precisely shaped beam of light through it, wash away the exposed parts, and etch the pattern underneath. Repeat dozens of times, layering circuit upon circuit, and you have a chip. The jaw-dropping part is the scale. Modern chips are built at 3 nanometres — roughly the width of ten silicon atoms. At that resolution, ordinary light is too coarse an instrument. Its wavelength is simply too long to draw lines that fine, the same way you can't write a word on a grain of rice with a house-painting brush. The solution, pioneered by a Dutch company called ASML, was extreme ultraviolet lithography — EUV. EUV uses light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres, generated by firing a laser at a tiny droplet of molten tin 50,000 times per second, producing a plasma hot enough to emit that specific wavelength. The light is then guided by mirrors coated to atomic-level smoothness — because at this scale, a surface imperfection the size of a single atom would ruin the image. ASML makes the only EUV machines in existence. Each one contains over 100,000 parts, requires a dedicated Boeing 747 to ship, and costs roughly the price of a mid-sized skyscraper.
In the World
In 2022, the United States government quietly pressured the Dutch government to stop ASML from exporting its EUV machines to China. No EUV machines had actually been shipped to China — ASML had already been withholding them since 2019 — but the US wanted to extend the restrictions to an older generation of machines too. The Dutch eventually agreed. What this episode revealed was that a single Dutch company, headquartered in the small city of Eindhoven, had become one of the most strategically important entities on Earth. China spends more on importing chips than it does on importing oil. Without access to EUV machines, its ambition to manufacture cutting-edge chips domestically is effectively blocked — not by tariffs or armies, but by the laws of physics and forty years of accumulated engineering knowledge that ASML's competitors have simply never been able to replicate. IBM, Intel, and Samsung have all tried. The physics is publicly understood. But building a machine that generates and controls plasma at 500,000 degrees Celsius, uses mirrors ground to sub-nanometre tolerances, and operates at the throughput required to be commercially viable turns out to be one of the hardest engineering feats in human history. ASML filed its first EUV patent in the 1990s. It shipped its first commercially viable machine in 2017. That gap — roughly 25 years — is the moat. Geopolitics has now reorganised itself, in part, around one machine made in Eindhoven.
Why It Matters
The chip shortage of 2021 — which held up car production, games consoles, and medical equipment — was a first glimpse of how deeply the physical world depends on a supply chain most people had never thought about. But the ASML story runs deeper than supply chains. It's a corrective to the idea that technology is endlessly replicable. We live with an assumption that if something can be built, it will eventually be built everywhere by everyone. Code spreads freely; designs can be copied; knowledge diffuses. But some technologies are so layered with tacit knowledge — the kind that lives in the hands and habits of engineers, not in patents or manuals — that they effectively cannot be reverse-engineered on any useful timescale. ASML is proof that a technology can be globally indispensable and yet remain functionally singular. That should make you think differently not just about chips, but about which other capabilities in the world are more concentrated and more fragile than they appear.
A Question to Ponder
If the most consequential technologies of our era can be controlled by a single company in a single city, what does that mean for how we think about technological 'progress' as something that belongs to everyone?
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