Why Every Advanced Chip on Earth Depends on One Company

This One Machine Controls the Future of AI and CPUs

For more than 50 years, Moore’s Law defined the rhythm of technological progress. Smaller transistors. Faster chips. Lower costs. More computing power for everyone.

It was never a law of physics. It was a prediction. A bet that human ingenuity would keep finding ways to make the impossible possible.

And for decades, engineers delivered.

Transistors shrank from micrometers to nanometers. Computers became billions of times more powerful. Smartphones, cloud computing, AI, and the modern internet all exist because Moore’s Law kept holding true.

Then around 2015, everything started to break.

The light used to manufacture chips became too large to print the next generation of transistors. Engineers were trying to carve features smaller than the wavelength of the light itself. The physics simply stopped cooperating.

Intel publicly admitted that its development cadence had slowed. Experts began writing obituaries for Moore’s Law. Without further scaling, chip progress would plateau. AI performance would stall. Computing advancement would slow across the entire industry.

The semiconductor world faced an existential crisis.

But in a small town called Veldhoven in the Netherlands, one company had been working on a solution for decades. A machine so complex that most engineers believed it could never work at industrial scale.

A machine that fires 50,000 molten tin droplets per second, vaporizes them with one of the most powerful pulsed lasers ever built, and turns plasma hotter than the surface of the sun into a kind of light that does not naturally exist on Earth.

That machine is ASML’s EUV lithography system.

It weighs as much as a Boeing 747.
It costs up to 400 million dollars per unit.
It contains more than 100,000 precision parts.
It takes months and hundreds of engineers to assemble.

And today, it is the only reason advanced chips still exist.

This video tells the full story of how EUV lithography was developed, why almost everyone believed it was impossible, and how ASML quietly became one of the most important companies in the world.

We cover:
• Why traditional chip scaling stopped working
• How extreme ultraviolet light is generated from molten tin plasma
• Why EUV mirrors had to be smoother than anything ever manufactured
• How ASML survived decades of doubt and near failure
• Why ASML now holds a complete monopoly on advanced chipmaking

This is not just a story about machines.
It is a story about engineering persistence, scientific limits, and how Moore’s Law was saved when physics said no.

Chapters and Timestamps

00:00 – 02:32 | Intro The Promise of Moore’s Law
02:32 – 04:45 | Chapter 1 The Problem Physics Hits a Wall
04:45 – 08:11 | Chapter 2 Solving the Impossible
08:11 – 09:43 | Chapter 3 Customers Become Partners
09:43 – 10:44 | Chapter 4 The Impact
10:44 – 11:06 | Chapter 5 Conclusion What Moore’s Law Really Was

Why This Story Matters

Every advanced chip today depends on ASML’s EUV machines.
The processors in your smartphone.
The GPUs powering AI models.
The CPUs running data centers.

There is no alternative technology at this scale.

That is why governments treat EUV lithography as a strategic asset and why access to these machines is tightly controlled. Without EUV, modern computing would stop moving forward.

This machine did not just save Moore’s Law.
It reshaped the future of technology.

B-Roll and Source Credits

B-roll and reference material courtesy of:
CNBC
Veritasium
ASML
Branch Education
Intel
Google
Apple
Jason Carman

All footage used under fair use for educational and documentary purposes.

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