The Customers Who Could Fund an AlternativeWide moat

ASML (ASML) — moat facet

The only parties with the money and motive to break the monopoly are the customers who co-funded building it.

If ASML's monopoly is ever broken commercially, the money will come from its own customers. Only a handful of firms buy leading-edge lithography, they are among the most profitable companies on earth, and each of them pays ASML prices set by a supplier with no alternative — which is precisely the condition that has historically funded second sources.

Why a customer-funded rival stays unbuiltCustomers paymonopoly pricesAny alternativeneeds 20 yearsFirst mover fundsrivals’ optionSo nobodymoves firstASML’s largest customers took equity to co-fund EUV. They benefit from it working.
The only parties who could break the monopoly are the ones who paid to build it.

The reason it has not happened is instructive. ASML's largest customers did not merely tolerate the EUV programme; they co-funded it, taking equity stakes to help finance development because they needed the machine to exist. Having paid for the monopoly, they benefit from its output: the tool works, it is delivered on a roadmap they can plan against, and a second source would take twenty years to become useful.

There is also a coordination problem. A credible alternative needs more spending than any one customer would rationally commit alone, and the first mover would fund a capability its competitors could then buy. That is why customer-funded alternatives are discussed and not built.

Watch for a customer consortium or a government-backed programme in the United States or Japan. It would be slow, expensive and probably unsuccessful — and it is the only commercially rational route by which this moat ends. ASML's sales to its largest customer alone reached 23.9% of revenue in 20251, which is the size of the incentive.

Moat trajectory: Widening

The most rational route to breaking this monopoly remains unbuilt, and the reasons are structural: a coordination problem between customers, a twenty-year payback, and the fact that ASML's largest buyers co-funded the current machine and benefit from it working. Nothing changed this year, which for ASML is the good outcome.

The number that tests this moat
Reported
Size of the incentive to fund an alternative
23.9% of ASML sales, to one customer

The only parties with the capital and motive are the customers who co-funded EUV by taking equity stakes, and who benefit from the machine working. A coordination problem and a twenty-year payback keep it unbuilt. Watch for a customer consortium or a state-backed programme in the US or Japan.

Source: ASML Form 20-F, FY2025 ↗
References
  1. ReportedSales to ASML's largest customer reached 23.9% of total net sales in 2025.
    ASML Form 20-F, FY2025 — total net sales to the largest customer amounted to EUR 7,796.7 million, or 23.9% of total net sales in 2025, compared with EUR 4,682.4 million, or 16.6%, in 2024; in 2025, 38.0% of total net sales were made to the two largest customers; while the ranking of the largest customers may shift year to year, sales remain concentrated among a limited group, and the loss of any key customer or a substantial change in their purchasing behaviour could have a material adverse effect; metrology and inspection customers largely overlap with those purchasing lithography systems — FY2025 (ended December 31, 2025) · publ. February 25, 2026 · source ↗
Sources
Generated September 23, 2026