make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company. ASML’s machines, which use a technique known as extreme ultraviolet lithography and produce chips at levels of astonishing atomic precision, are among the most complex manufactured goods in history. These three companies have a choke hold on cutting-edge chips, a technology so physically constrained that one estimate argues they cost up to $10 billion per kilogram.
