ASML, Europe’s most valuable company, said yesterday that its planned production capacity for both 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet customer demand for its chipmaking machines, as orders linked to artificial intelligence investment continue to rise.
The Dutch group, the only supplier of the machines used to make the world’s most powerful semiconductors, said it was investigating ways to expand capacity for 2028 beyond the 30 per cent increase it had previously announced.
The update came with third-quarter results showing record total net sales of €11.7bn, up 55 per cent on a year earlier. Net income rose to €5bn, from €2.1bn in the third quarter of 2025, according to the company’s results statements.
ASML said it expects fourth-quarter sales of between €14.2bn and €15.2bn, and narrowed its full-year forecast to between €44bn and €45bn, from the €43bn to €45bn range it gave in July.
Shares in the company rose 1.5 per cent in Amsterdam yesterday. They have risen by 80 per cent over the past year, giving ASML a market capitalisation of nearly €600bn.
The company described demand as “very, very strong” and said customers were already looking to secure equipment several years ahead.
“Our customers continue to increase their short- and medium-term equipment demand forecasts with us, driven primarily by their views on the size and duration of AI-related investments,” said Christophe Fouquet, ASML’s chief executive. “In light of their demand visibility, some customers are expressing an interest in placing orders with us for 2029 and even 2030.”
He added: “With such strong visibility and an order book momentum that continues to increase quarter on quarter this year, we now expect that our supply as currently planned for both 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet the demand of our customers.”
Fouquet said ASML was investigating ways to increase capacity for 2028 beyond the 30 per cent rise it had previously communicated. “In addition, we continue to provide significant wafer capacity to our customers through our productivity upgrade portfolio,” he said.
In July, ASML said it planned to raise capacity by 30 per cent next year and was considering a similar expansion in 2028. The company said yesterday that those plans would no longer be enough to fulfil its order book.
ASML is the sole global supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, which are used by chipmakers including Samsung, Intel and TSMC to produce advanced semiconductors.
Each EUV machine is the size of a small bus, contains 100,000 precision components and 2km of cabling, and costs about $200m. It projects intricate designs onto silicon wafers at a scale of about twice the width of a human DNA strand.
The wafers are then developed with chemicals that etch the pattern of conductors and insulators needed to connect and isolate billions of transistors. The process can be repeated up to 100 times on the same wafer before it is cut into chips destined for data centres.
Demand for the machines has grown alongside the rapid expansion of data centres and a global push to integrate AI.
ASML was founded in Eindhoven in 1984 as a joint venture between the electronics group Philips and the chip-machine maker Advanced Semiconductor Materials International.
Its breakthrough came in the early 1990s, when its PAS 5500 machine became the first system to reliably produce the larger, eight-inch silicon wafers required by major chipmakers such as IBM.
The company listed on the Nasdaq and the Amsterdam stock exchange in 1995, after which Philips began selling its shares.
ASML has come close to bankruptcy several times. As recently as 2012 it asked Intel, TSMC and Samsung for a multibillion-dollar cash injection to bring its EUV technology to market.
It now employs more than 45,500 people.
