ASML reported €11.7 billion of net sales and €5.0 billion of net income for the third quarter, at a gross margin of 57.5%. It guided to €14.2–15.2 billion for the fourth quarter and €44–45 billion for the full year.
The sentence that matters is not in the numbers. Chief executive Christophe Fouquet said the company “now expect[s] that our supply as currently planned for both 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet the demand of our customers”. Customers are raising forecasts, some are asking about slots in 2029 and 2030, and ASML attributes that to their views on how large and how long the AI build-out will be. A 30% increase in low-NA EUV and immersion capacity is already planned for 2027, and the company is looking at ways to add more for 2028.
A lithography tool is the longest lead item in the industry. Each one is built to order over roughly a year and a half, installed over months, and qualified after that. When the tool maker says it is sold out two years ahead, the fab capacity those tools would have produced is fixed through to the end of the decade, whatever anybody orders now.
That is the number to carry into a product plan. Wafer capacity for 2028 is being allocated on the strength of forecasts submitted this year, and a project that arrives late to that queue competes for leftovers.
There is a second-order effect worth watching. When leading-edge capacity is rationed, the tools that make mature nodes become attractive again, and the same supplier builds both. Equipment slots are fungible in a way that fab capacity is not.
Source: ASML