What Machine Requires 40 Shipping Containers, 20 Trucks and 3 Boeing 747s to Ship Across Borders?

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The most complicated $150 million chip-making machine humans have ever built is widely acknowledged as necessary for making the most advanced chips, an ability with geopolitical implications.

The machine is made by Dutch company ASML Holding, based in Veldhoven, in the southern Netherlands. Its system uses a different kind of light to define ultrasmall circuitry on chips, packing more performance into the small slices of silicon. ASML became an independent company and by far the biggest supplier of chip-manufacturing equipment that involves a process called lithography.

Since ASML introduced its commercial EUV model in 2017, customers have bought about 100 of them. Buyers include Samsung and TSMC, the biggest service producing chips designed by other companies. TSMC uses the tool to make the processors designed by Apple for its latest iPhones. Intel and IBM have said EUV is crucial to their plans.

Read on to learn more.