Ninety-four lithography scanners went to memory makers in the first half of 2026, ten more than in the same stretch of 2025. The revenue they carried rose 53%, to €6.40 billion . Units up an eighth, revenue up half — that gap is where the investment case in ASML Holding now lives, and it is not a DRAM pricing story.
ASML is the Veldhoven company whose machines print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, and it reports as a single segment because that is honestly what it is: a lithography supplier whose sales fall into three lines — extreme-ultraviolet scanners, the older deep-ultraviolet immersion and dry systems alongside metrology and inspection, and Installed Base Management, the service-and-upgrade annuity attached to every tool it has ever shipped . It is the only company that builds EUV machines, and it holds roughly 90% of the lithography market ; in DUV it meets Canon and Nikon, which it describes as substantial competitors with broad patent portfolios .
That franchise has been violently repriced. The ADR closed at $1,867.31 on October 2, almost exactly double its 52-week low of $935.41, valuing the company near $720 billion . The move came in two parts, and only the second is about earnings: the shares had already gained about half from that low by the time of the January results, and have added roughly another third since — a stretch in which management took 2026 revenue guidance from €34–39 billion at a 51–53% gross margin to €43–45 billion at 54–56% . Raising the revenue midpoint 20% in six months is a rare thing for a company this size, and it is what converted a sentiment rally into a defensible one.
So the interesting question is no longer whether AI demand is real. It is what today's price actually underwrites. My answer: 2027 is close to sold out and barely contested; the live argument is 2028, where the bar is lower than the bears allow — and the intensity shift inside memory is the evidence that clears it.