Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "CNBC" channel.

  1. This is similar to e.g. Lego getting and maintaining monopoly to create highly accurate pieces of plastic. Basically anybody interested to work on the field wants to work for the company and as a result, they always get best of the best of all future engineers. The total amount of people skilled enough to improve the machines ASML is already making is really small and pretty much every one of those people want to work for ASML because they have the best tech currently. This creates a self-maintaining loop that will make the monopoly even stronger in long run.
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  2. Compared to the costs of Manhattan Project, this machine is cheap. However, I totally agree that the technology required is like mixture of Large Hadron Collier and stuff that SpaceX does. And to make that reliable is the hardest part of the equation. What wasn't mentioned is that EUV lithography uses light interference patterns for the actual chip manufacturing and computing those interference patterns requires so complicated calculations that chip manufacturers are running supercomputers to compute the masks and they are still typically computationally limited, not manufacturing capacity limited with these machines.
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