What they all sit on
Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and Microsoft don't make their chips. Trace who does, and then who makes their machines, and it ends at one company.
The full story
Three layers, and the bottom one is a name most people have never said out loud.
The top layer designs. Apple, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm draw their chips and hand the files to TSMC. Tesla signed an eight-year deal worth at least $16.5bn for Samsung to build its AI6 chip at the Taylor, Texas fab, with mass production targeted for the second half of 2027. Microsoft and Amazon have both been confirmed as customers for Intel's 18A process, for Azure and AWS silicon.
The middle layer manufactures. Three companies run leading-edge logic at scale: TSMC, Samsung Foundry and Intel Foundry. That is the whole list.
The bottom layer makes the machine all three need. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is what prints the smallest features on a modern chip, and ASML in Veldhoven is the only company on earth that builds an EUV scanner. Nikon and Canon left the technology more than a decade ago and nobody replaced them.
The scale of that bottleneck: ASML said it will ship about 65 low-NA EUV systems in 2026, up from 44 in 2025. Sixty-five machines a year is the tap for the entire advanced chip industry.
One caveat on reading this frame, and it matters. Each line names ONE product and who fabricates it - not everything that company buys. Apple has Samsung and LG making iPhone displays and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron making the memory; none of that changes the fact that the processor it designs is built by TSMC. Qualcomm has used Samsung Foundry for parts in the past. And TSMC itself still buys plenty of older, non-EUV tools from Nikon and Canon.
Why it matters: when people talk about chip supply risk they usually mean Taiwan. The narrower point is a single Dutch company with a single product line, and a queue that is measured in dozens of units a year.
Next week: what one of those machines actually costs.
