17JUN

High-NA goes to volume at Intel Foundry

2 min read

10:21UTC

ASML and Intel Foundry said on 8 September that High-NA lithography can now be used in high-volume manufacturing, with more than 1 million wafers processed on the tool class to date.

← Back to Three records fall in one afternoon Jump to analysis ↓

SportAssessed

Key takeaway

Intel now runs High-NA in volume, on machines only one Dutch company builds.

In a joint statement issued on 8 September 2026, ASML and Intel Foundry said High-NA (high numerical aperture) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the tool class that prints the finest features on advanced logic chips, can now be used in high-volume manufacturing at Intel Foundry. More than 1 million wafers have been processed on it to date, across early tool certification and testing, research and development, and production on select layers for a subset of Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Overlay, throughput and availability are meeting Intel Foundry's expectations, the two companies say.⁠¹

ASML, based in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, is the only company in the world that builds these machines. Its chief executive, Christophe Fouquet, credits Intel Foundry with shipping the first high-volume logic product manufactured with High-NA.⁠² The same release sets out how customers reach that point without new masks: Intel Foundry offers reticle stitching and process design kit support that let designers use High-NA EUV with the industry's standard 6-inch mask rather than wait for the move to a 6x12-inch format.⁠³ ASML separately announced an expanded collaboration with Samsung Electronics on next-generation manufacturing the same day.⁠⁴

Intel cannot buy this equipment from anyone else, and neither can Samsung. Europe holds one chokepoint in the semiconductor stack, inside one company, and that chokepoint is currently being spent equipping fabs owned elsewhere. ASML's own numbers carry the harder evidence. ASML raised its 2026 guidance to €43 billion to 45 billion in July and dropped its export-control hedge, and on 8 September two of the largest logic manufacturers in the world announced what they can now do with Dutch equipment neither of them can source anywhere. On this tool class, the dependency runs towards Veldhoven.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

EUV lithography machines use extreme ultraviolet light to print the tiny patterns on computer chips. High-NA is the newest, most precise generation of this technology, and ASML, based in the Netherlands, is the only company in the world that makes it. On 8 September, ASML and Intel said this new tool is now being used to make chips in large commercial quantities for the first time, inside an Intel factory. Only Intel has reached this stage so far. Europe supplies the machine that makes the world's most advanced chips, but the first factory to mass-produce chips with it is American.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The gating constraint has been mask size, not exposure-tool throughput. High-NA's larger optical field was designed around a 6x12-inch reticle format that most customers have not adopted; ASML's 8 September announcement includes a reticle-stitching technique that lets Intel Foundry keep using standard 6-inch masks.

That workaround, not additional manufacturing capacity, is what let one customer reach high-volume production ahead of the wider mask-format transition.

What could happen next?

Meaning
ASML's tool monopoly does not by itself determine which country hosts the first high-volume use of each new lithography generation.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from Belgium

Belgium

Primary parallel: ASML shipped its first High-NA EUV tool, the EXE:5000, to Intel in December 2023. Reaching high-volume logic production roughly three years later mirrors the multi-year gap between first EUV tool shipment and volume adoption in the early 2010s, when lithography readiness consistently outran customer qualification timelines.

Counter-parallel: Standard EUV ramped at multiple foundries in parallel from the outset. High-NA's first high-volume customer is Intel alone; Samsung remains at the collaboration stage on the same day's announcement.

Consensus view: ASML and Intel Foundry's joint 8 September statement puts more than one million wafers processed on High-NA EUV tools to date, spanning tool certification, R&D and volume production on select layers of Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) chips, with overlay, throughput and availability meeting Intel Foundry's own targets.

Counter-view: The same day, ASML separately announced only a collaboration expansion with Samsung on next-generation manufacturing, not high-volume production. Bruegel's 19 May analysis found Europe structurally dependent on US or Chinese computing infrastructure regardless of policy, noting Chinese domestic chips already power 41% of China's data centres.

Key tension: Whether ASML's tooling monopoly converts into European fabrication capacity at all, given the first high-volume logic customer for its most advanced tool is a US foundry, not a European one.

Sources:European Commission

Mentions:ASML →Christophe Fouquet →Samsung Electronics →Intel →Bruegel →Netherlands →China →Veldhoven →

First Reported In

Update #15 · Mistral closes EUR 3bn; Luxembourg buys in

European Commission· 8 Sept 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

ASML booms, Europe's fab gap holds

ASML's July guidance raise and dropped export-control hedge preceded its High-NA volume-production announcement.

Occurred 15 Jul 2026

Read story →

This Event

High-NA goes to volume at Intel Foundry

The one tool class no company outside the Netherlands can build has entered volume production, and it did so inside an American fab.

Different Perspectives

French Football Federation

The FFF called an 11:00 CEST press conference for 28 July, at its Paris headquarters, following an extraordinary executive committee meeting, at which Zinedine Zidane is expected to be presented as head coach succeeding Didier Deschamps. As of this writing no communique confirms the appointment, contract length or start date.

Morocco

Morocco is pushing for the 2030 final at its Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, a planned 115,000-seat venue that would be the world's largest football stadium on completion. The venue is contested by a Spanish petition for the Santiago Bernabeu, and FIFA has fixed neither the venue nor the tournament's proposed 64-team format.

FIFA

FIFA's first tournament report, published 27 July, itemises nearly 300,000 accredited personnel, 73,700 security staff and 300,000 square metres of custom-grown turf, with no revenue or cost figure attached. As a Swiss association answering to its own Congress rather than a treasury, FIFA has followed the same operational-before-financial sequence it used after Qatar 2022.

Javier Tebas / La Liga

La Liga president Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his words, concluded. Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so days after the IOC declined jurisdiction over a separate ethics complaint, he used the only instrument he has.

Mexico City government

Head of government Clara Brugada presented a closing report on 22 July crediting the tournament with 44 billion pesos of economic activity, 2,000-plus accelerated public works and 100,000 formal jobs in June alone. The city has not published the method behind that figure, and three other Mexican bodies count the same five weeks differently.

Town of Foxborough

Foxborough answered Kraft Group's June lawsuit on 7 July with a 61-page counterclaim, calling the stadium's owners 'a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations' trying to shift its $7.8 million security bill onto taxpayers. The town says its licensing power and its billing power run through the same board, and it wants the court to award its own costs too.