ASML is the single most important company you've never used a product from: it is the ONLY firm on Earth that makes EUV (and High-NA EUV) lithography machines — the room-sized tools that print the world's most advanced chips. Every leading-edge processor, from NVIDIA's GPUs to Apple's phones, is patterned on an ASML machine, making this Dutch company the chokepoint of the entire chip economy.
The chokepoint of the chip world
ASML sits one step upstream of the foundries: it buys mirrors from Zeiss and light sources from its own Cymer unit, assembles them into EUV machines no one else can build, and sells them to TSMC, Samsung, Intel and the memory makers. Every advanced chip on Earth must pass through an ASML tool.