Tech giant ASML has reported a quarterly record in orders of its chip-making equipment, boosting hopes for the sustainability of the artificial intelligence boom and countering fears of an investment bubble. The Dutch firm said on Wednesday that it booked orders worth 13.2 billion euros ($15.8bn) in the final quarter of 2025, more than half of which were for its most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. Net sales came to 9.7 billion euros in the October-December period, ASML said, taking sales for all of 2025 to 32.7 billion euros. Net profit for the year was 9.6 billion euros, up from 7.6 billion euros in 2024. ASML Chief Executive Officer Christophe Fouquet said the company's chip-making customers had conveyed a "notably more positive assessment" of the market situation in the medium term based on expectations of strong AI-related demand.

Large language models have shown impressive performance in various domains, including code generation across diverse open-source domains. However, their applicability in proprietary industrial settings, where domain-specific constraints and code interdependencies are prevalent, remains largely unexplored. We present a case study conducted in collaboration with the leveling department at ASML to investigate the performance of LLMs in generating functional, maintainable code within a closed, highly specialized software environment. We developed an evaluation framework tailored to ASML's proprietary codebase and introduced a new benchmark. Additionally, we proposed a new evaluation metric, build@k, to assess whether LLM-generated code successfully compiles and integrates within real industrial repositories. We investigate various prompting techniques, compare the performance of generic and code-specific LLMs, and examine the impact of model size on code generation capabilities, using both match-based and execution-based metrics. The findings reveal that prompting techniques and model size have a significant impact on output quality, with few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting yielding the highest build success rates. The difference in performance between the code-specific LLMs and generic LLMs was less pronounced and varied substantially across different model families.

A small town in the Netherlands hosts the only factory that produces the only chip-making machines that generate a type of light found nowhere naturally on Earth: extreme ultraviolet, a light emitted by young stars in outer space. This light, known as EUV, is the only way to make one of the world's most valuable and important technologies at scale: cutting-edge semiconductor chips. The factory is forbidden from selling its EUV machines to China. Below we explain how the chips are made, why they have become the focus of the US-China trade wars, how Taiwan was drawn into the maelstrom, and what could come next. The answers take us from deep underground to outer space, from the dirtiest places in the world to the cleanest, from the hottest temperatures to the coldest, from man-made structures smaller than a virus to equipment so large it takes three planes to move, and finally, to a state in physics that is two opposites at the same time.

The US has announced new export restrictions targeting China's ability to make advanced semiconductors, drawing swift condemnation from Beijing. Washington is expanding efforts to curb exports of state-of-the-art chips to China that can be used in advanced weapons systems and in artificial intelligence. The announcement on Monday came a few weeks before Donald Trump returns as president, where he is expected to bolster Washington's hawkish stance on China. On Monday the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, said Joe Biden's presidency had been especially tough in "strategically addressing China's military modernisation through export controls". Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said: "The United States has taken significant steps to protect our technology from being used by our adversaries in ways that threaten our national security."

In the 1950s I spent a significant chunk of my pocket money buying a transistor. It was a small metal cylinder (about 5mm in diameter and 7mm deep) with three wires protruding from its base. I needed it for a little radio I was building, and buying it was a big deal for a lad living in rural Ireland. My baffled parents couldn't understand why this gizmo their son was holding between finger and thumb could be interesting; and, to be honest, you couldn't blame them. The A13 processor that powers the iPhone that I used to find a photograph of that first transistor has 8.5 billion of them etched on to a sliver of silicon no bigger than a fingernail – a "chip".

Japan and the Netherlands will join the United States in imposing chip bans on China, Bloomberg reports. The goal is to "undercut Beijing's ambition to build its own domestic chip capabilities", according to the outlet's sources. The Dutch company ASML Holding HV will be prevented from transferring deep ultraviolet lithography machines used for chip manufacturing, and similar restrictions will be imposed on the Japanese Nikon Corp. The joint effort is an expansion on US President Joe Biden's policy to limit China's ability to manufacture and develop its own semiconductors, used for AI and machine learning in the military, but will also affect the mobile technology industry as well. US equipment makers complained that preventing only American companies from trading with China is affecting their competitiveness, which lead to Dutch and Japanese government reconsidering how ASML, alongside Tokyo Electron, are exporting such machinery.

Even in the midst of a complicated market environment for growthy tech stocks, the future is still happening. Investors who want exposure to cutting edge technologies may be on the look out for a machine learning ETF like the Franklin Intelligent Machines ETF (IQM), which has notable exposure to key firms in the semiconductor supply chain. It's no secret that semiconductors have had an up and down year, including the U.S. placing significant new restrictions on selling advanced chip technology to China and the many semiconductor firms based there. But there are signs that the worst for the sector may be over following Warren Buffet's Taiwan semiconductor stock buy. One recent firm investors may want to keep an eye on may be ASML (ASML), the Dutch semiconductor company.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will be one of the most important trends of the century. Companies that play leading roles in driving this incredible technology shift forward will likely see incredible business performance and deliver market-crushing returns for shareholders. With that in mind, ASML Holding ( ASML -2.30%) and ON Semiconductor ( ON -2.51%) stand out as top stocks for long-term investors looking to benefit from the AI revolution. Let's take a closer look at why these two companies are on track to facilitate and benefit from the dawning age of artificial intelligence. ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines are helping semiconductor manufacturers boost the number of transistors they can fit into a chip, opening the door for improved power and efficiency.