ASML Lifts Guidance to €45 Billion as Supply Chain Struggles

€43 billion to €45 billion. On July 15, ASML raised its full-year 2026 net sales guidance for the second time in six months, up from the €40 billion to €42 billion range it set in January and well ahead of the "flat to zero" consensus some analysts had braced for at the start of the year. The Dutch equipment maker also guided third-quarter net sales between €11.0 billion and €12.0 billion, a number that implies quarterly revenue growth of roughly 15 percent at the midpoint. The stock fell anyway, down on the day, as CNBC reported, a reminder that in this cycle, even a guidance raise can undershoot the whisper number.

The earnings beat was powered by two forces that have become familiar to anyone tracking the lithography supply chain. First, AI-driven demand for advanced logic and high-bandwidth memory is pulling forward orders for extreme ultraviolet lithography tools faster than ASML can build them. Second, the company's Installed Base Management business, servicing, upgrading, and refurbishing the roughly 2,500 machines already in the field, delivered stronger-than-expected revenue, as Zacks noted in its post-earnings analysis. Together, these two lines accounted for the bulk of the upside surprise.

CEO Christophe Fouquet attributed the raised outlook to "continued strong momentum in customer demand" and ASML's ability to "drive higher output with strength in our supply chain," according to Seeking Alpha's transcript summary. The second clause is the one that matters. Demand is not the problem. The problem, as it has been since 2023, is whether ASML's own suppliers, Carl Zeiss SMT for the ultra-precision mirrors, TRUMPF for the 30 kW carbon dioxide drive lasers, VDL for the vacuum chambers and wafer-handling modules, can keep pace with the volume ASML is now promising.

ASML disclosed plans to increase Low-NA EUV capacity by roughly 30 percent for 2027. On paper, that translates to approximately 80 to 90 EUV systems per year, up from the 60 to 70 range the company has been shipping. Translating that target into factory-floor reality means Zeiss must deliver more of the multilayer mirrors that are the single most constrained subsystem in the entire EUV ecosystem. Each mirror takes months to polish to the required sub-atomic smoothness. There is exactly one factory in Oberkochen, Germany, that produces them. Every EUV roadmap, ASML's, TSMC's, Intel's, Samsung's, funnels through that building.

The capacity expansion also raises the stakes for the High-NA transition. ASML's next-generation TWINSCAN EXE:5200B systems, with a numerical aperture of 0.55, cost approximately €380 million per unit, roughly double the price of a Low-NA NXE:3800E. In May, Fouquet told Reuters that the first chips manufactured with High-NA machines would be delivered "within months." That milestone appears to have been met. On July 14, Reuters reported that Intel had decided to use a High-NA ASML tool to manufacture its latest laptop processors, and Interesting Engineering confirmed that Intel Foundry became the first chipmaker to ship high-volume logic produced with next-generation lithography tools. Intel got there first. TSMC and Samsung will follow, but the sequencing matters: the company that debugs High-NA for high-volume manufacturing earns a process window that competitors have to close.

What the machine chooses not to do

Every chipmaking tool represents a set of trade-offs, and the EXE:5200B is no exception. What High-NA EUV chose not to be good at is throughput. The 0.55 NA optics enable 8 nm half-pitch resolution, a genuine shrink over the 13 nm half-pitch of 0.33 NA systems, but the larger mirror assemblies and tighter overlay tolerances mean fewer wafers per hour than a mature Low-NA system running a well-characterised process. For Intel, which is using High-NA on a specific laptop chip design with relatively modest die size, the throughput penalty is manageable. For a foundry running hundreds of thousands of wafer starts per month on leading-edge nodes, the economics are less forgiving. TSMC's well-documented resistance to High-NA, which The Information reported extends to price negotiations with ASML, is partly about throughput math and partly about not wanting to pay €380 million per tool when Low-NA double-patterning can still hit the required pitches for N2 and beyond.

That pricing tension is not a secret. ASML plans to raise prices across its equipment portfolio, The Information reported, and TSMC, ASML's largest customer, is pushing back. The dynamic is familiar to any supplier with a de facto monopoly: the customer needs the product, resents the price, and funds R&D for alternatives that do not yet exist. ASML's pricing power is real but not absolute. Every price increase pulls forward the economic case for competitors, even if no competitor is anywhere close to shipping a working EUV system.

Export controls and the China question

On June 19, TechCrunch reported that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had, in a series of meetings, told senior ASML executives he was concerned that one of the Dutch company's EUV machines might have reached China. ASML flatly denied the suggestion. Fouquet's position, as characterised by TechCrunch's Connie Loizos, rested on a straightforward commercial logic: ASML would not risk its entire export license framework, and access to the US-origin components that make EUV possible, to arm a single Chinese customer. The machines are too large, too complex to install, and too dependent on remote diagnostics to be hidden. Every EUV system ASML ships is tracked, serviced, and monitored.

The Lutnick-Fouquet exchange matters because it reveals the tightening pincer around China's semiconductor ambitions. EUV remains out of reach for Chinese fabs. Deep ultraviolet (DUV) immersion tools, which ASML can still ship to China under current licensing rules for certain nodes, are also facing progressively tighter restrictions. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is pressing foreign chipmakers to build memory fabrication plants on American soil, as 24/7 Wall Street reported, with potential beneficiaries including Micron and the equipment suppliers that would outfit those fabs. A memory fab in Arizona or Ohio that uses EUV for DRAM production is still an ASML customer; the geography of the cleanroom does not change the supplier.

The memory market is undergoing its own EUV-driven transformation. The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) segment is projected to triple to roughly $60 billion by the end of 2026, according to 24/7 Wall Street's analysis, forcing Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron into an aggressive EUV procurement cycle. DRAM layers that once used argon-fluoride immersion are migrating to EUV to reduce die size and power consumption. Each HBM stack requires multiple DRAM dies, and each DRAM die at 1c or 1d generation requires more EUV layers than the generation before. ASML's order book reflects this: memory customers now account for a growing share of EUV system bookings, a shift from the logic-dominated mix of 2023 and 2024.

It is the only company capable of producing EUV lithography machines at scale. These machines are necessary to manufacture advanced chips for AI, smartphones, and high-performance computing., Zacks Equity Research, July 11, 2026

That monopoly position, as Zacks laid out ahead of the Q2 report, is not an exaggeration. No other company has shipped a production-grade EUV lithography system. Canon's nanoimprint lithography targets a different niche, memory layers with regular patterns, and lacks the resolution for leading-edge logic. Nikon exited EUV development years ago. China's SMEE has publicly stated ambitions for domestic EUV but has not demonstrated a working prototype at a commercially viable throughput. The gap between ASML and the rest of the field is measured in decades of R&D spending and a supply chain that took thirty years to assemble.

That supply chain is the real story beneath the earnings headline. When Quartz reported the guidance raise, it noted that ASML had lifted its outlook for the second time in 2026. Each raise is a bet that the company can push more systems through the Veldhoven factory floor. The factory itself is not the bottleneck, ASML has been expanding assembly capacity for years. The bottleneck sits upstream: the Zeiss mirror facility, the TRUMPF laser line in Ditzingen, the specialty steel and ceramics suppliers whose lead times stretch into multiple quarters. ASML's guidance is, in effect, a public statement that its suppliers have committed to the volume.

SK hynix joined the Nasdaq this month, as Motley Fool reported, a listing that underscores the memory industry's deepening integration with US capital markets, and, by extension, with the US-origin equipment supply chain that ASML both depends on and anchors. Each quarter, ASML breaks down net system sales by destination and by technology node, and the trend line shows memory customers climbing as a proportion of the backlog. When a Korean memory maker lists on the Nasdaq and builds a fab in America with EUV tools from a Dutch supplier using German optics and American software, the supply chain is no longer a chain. It is a knot.

Retail investors appear to have absorbed this narrative more readily than the analysts. Stocktwits sentiment, as aggregated by Yahoo Finance, called ASML the "ultimate" chipmaker stock in the week before earnings, eyeing a second consecutive week of gains. The retail bull case is simple: a monopoly supplier to an industry in secular growth, with pricing power and an insurmountable technology moat. The bear case, less discussed on Stocktwits, is that ASML trades at roughly 45 times forward earnings, pricing in growth that requires flawless execution from suppliers it does not control.

The 30 percent Low-NA capacity expansion for 2027 will be the test. If ASML ships 85 EUV systems next year, the supply chain held. If it ships 70, the bottleneck is real and the guidance will come down. The next checkpoint is the Q3 earnings report in October, when Fouquet will have to show that the order backlog converted into delivered systems at the rate the raised guidance implies. The number to watch is not the revenue figure, it is the unit count of EUV systems recognised in the quarter, and whether the split between logic and memory orders is shifting faster than the supply base can absorb.