ASML closed Wednesday, June 3rd, as the most valuable company in European history, reaching a market cap of $668 billion and passing the $650 billion record Novo Nordisk set in June 2024. The Dutch firm, which is the sole supplier of the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that TSMC, Samsung, and Intel use to print leading-edge logic, rose after JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley published near-identical notes arguing it can manufacture far more machines than the market had assumed.
The two banks raised their price targets on the same day, JPMorgan to €1,900 from €1,515 and Morgan Stanley to €1,660 from €1,400, both keeping Overweight ratings. JPMorgan analyst Sandeep Deshpande argued that ASML can deliver more than 110 low-NA EUV systems without adding new building capacity, well above the roughly 90 units investors had previously cited as the maximum and above the company's own near-term output.
That output is mission-critical for the chip industry because EUV remains a severe chokepoint on advanced chip supply. Every wafer of leading-edge silicon used to train and run AI models passes through an ASML scanner at some stage, so more machines shipping translates directly into more capacity for the fabs downstream.
Morgan Stanley said its greater confidence in near-term shipments stemmed from comments at ASML's April annual general meeting, where the company outlined an expansion at the Brainport Industries Campus in Eindhoven, with construction set to begin in the third quarter of 2026. The bank cautioned that the campus "needs to be the start of a multi-phase build-out" to fully alleviate capacity concerns.
ASML’s record ironically sits below the bar set by the companies ASML supplies. Its market cap remains short of the trillion-dollar mark that several U.S. chip firms have cleared, and the stock's roughly 50% gain this year has trailed the broader semiconductor sector, which has run far hotter on AI demand. ASML had already passed SAP as Europe's largest listed company and is now worth more than the next two European firms, HSBC and Roche, combined.
And while the company holds a monopoly, its long-term dominance isn’t guaranteed; several efforts are currently taking aim at it. Substrate, a San Francisco startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and the CIA-linked In-Q-Tel, has raised $100 million for a particle-accelerator X-ray lithography system that it claims can pattern 2nm-class features at roughly $10,000 per wafer against the $100,000 it models for leading-edge EUV. Canon is also shipping commercial nanoimprint tools, while Nikon has entered with a lower-end product, and China has touted a workaround to ASML's equipment.
None of these is likely to replace an EUV scanner in high-volume logic anytime soon, where ASML's tools run from roughly $235 million for a low-NA system to about $380 million for the High-NA EXE:5200B that Intel installed late last year for its 14A node.
Asked about rivals by TechCrunch last month, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said the gap between wanting the technology and having it remains vast, adding that "when you start from scratch, the challenge is enormous."
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
