ASML has spent 2026 getting steadily, expensively larger. The Dutch company whose machines print the world’s most advanced chips is now Europe’s most valuable listed business, worth around $700bn (€600bn), and enough of the investors who own it now say the next round number out loud that the question has stopped sounding fanciful: could ASML be Europe’s first trillion-dollar company?
The case rests on the order book more than the share price. AI has pushed demand for lithography systems past what ASML can build, and the company is shaving weeks off the time it takes to assemble each machine, from about 22 weeks toward 15 or 16.
While planning to lift annual output of its extreme ultraviolet systems by around 30% next year and to raise production of its cheaper deep-ultraviolet machines by a similar margin. It has raised its 2026 sales forecast twice and is close to fully booked for 2027.
The maths is not exotic. Reaching a trillion means adding roughly $300bn, a gain of a little over 40% on a stock that has already climbed about 60% this year and, in June, became the most valuable European company on record.
ASML has added well over $250bn in market value this year alone, and Barclays, Susquehanna and Bernstein have all nudged price targets toward $2,600 a share since the results, even with the stock trading near 38 times next year’s expected earnings.
“I think it has a really good chance of being the first company in Europe to hit the trillion mark,” Carolyn Bell of Stonehage Fleming said. “I just don’t know when.”
The second-quarter figures gave the argument its legs. ASML reported net sales of €9.3bn and net income of €2.9bn at a 54% gross margin, shipped 86 lithography systems against 67 in the first quarter, and lifted full-year guidance to €43-45bn from a previous €36-40bn.
It guided to €11-12bn of net sales in the third quarter and returned €1.1bn to shareholders through buybacks in the period, and chief executive Christophe Fouquet put the momentum down to customers accelerating capacity for AI.
Underneath the numbers is a monopoly. ASML is the only firm that makes EUV lithography machines, and this year Intel became the first to ship high-volume commercial chips, its Panther Lake laptop processors, made on the newest High-NA version, a $400m tool roughly twice the price of a standard EUV system.
High-NA machines resolve finer features in a single exposure, which is what lets chipmakers keep shrinking the transistors that AI accelerators are hungry for.
TSMC and Samsung are following at their own pace, which means every leading-edge chipmaker eventually pays ASML.
The caveats are the familiar ones. Roughly a fifth of this year’s sales are expected to come from China, down sharply from around half two years ago as export controls bite, and a proposed US law could narrow that channel further.
The broader worry is cyclicality, since lithography orders track the capital spending of a handful of chipmakers and the hyperscalers funding them, and that spending has turned down before.
Shares actually fell on the day of the guidance upgrade, a reminder that a stock priced for perfection can disappoint by merely doing well. What steadies the story is visibility: ASML books its machines years before it ships them, so the near-term revenue is easier to see than for most hardware companies.
The strategic picture is steadier than the share price, which is why the Dutch government has gone to some lengths to keep the company at home.
The title of Europe’s most valuable company has changed hands more than once in recent years, passing between software, luxury and pharma, and never settling for long.
This time a chipmaker may be the one to push the continent past a marker only a handful of American technology giants have ever reached.
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