Co-Dependence with the Chip GiantsWide moat

ASML's relationship with its leading-edge customers is best understood not as buyer-and-seller but as mutual co-dependence between a tiny handful of firms whose futures are intertwined. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and a few others are the only companies on earth able to afford¹ and operate ASML's most advanced machines; ASML is the only company able to supply them. Neither side has an alternative, so the relationship is not transactional but strategic and long-term: the customers and ASML co-plan technology roadmaps years ahead, co-develop the machines to the customers' needs, and rise and fall together as the leading edge advances.

This co-dependence is, counterintuitively, a source of strength. It means ASML's biggest customers are not shopping around or playing suppliers against each other — they cannot — but are locked into a partnership as essential to them as it is to ASML. Their success is ASML's success: as TSMC builds more leading-edge capacity to serve the AI boom, it buys more machines from ASML, and the two grow together. The relationship is closer to a strategic alliance than a sale, binding the world's most important chipmakers to ASML through shared roadmaps, shared investment, and shared dependence on the advance of Moore's Law. The customers are few, but they are partners for the life of the technology, and there is no version of the leading-edge future that does not run through ASML.