ASML Says AI Chipmakers Want More Machines Than It Can Build

By Stock Titan Editorial Team Published October 14, 2026, 03:55 AM EDT

ASML’s record quarter in plain numbers

ASML sold €11.7 billion of machines and services in the July to September quarter, its highest quarterly total, and expects between €14.2 billion and €15.2 billion in the final quarter of 2026, according to its third quarter release. Sales came in the upper half of the €11.0 billion to €12.0 billion range the company had given in July, and a little under the €11.71 billion in the consensus compiled by Visible Alpha.

The headline profit needs one correction before it is compared with anything. Net income was €5.0 billion, but chief financial officer Roger Dassen said in the company’s results video transcript that it includes "€500 million for the revaluation of the first tranche that we bought from Mistral AI", the AI company in which ASML holds a stake. The financial statements show that gain as €509.7 million on its own line, below operating income, so the cleaner measure of the business is income from operations, which more than doubled.

The number of machines matters as much as the euros. ASML sold 121 lithography systems in the quarter against 72 a year earlier, and 17 of them were EUV machines, the most advanced type, against 9 in the third quarter of 2025, according to the investor presentation and the January fourth quarter presentation.

A Dutch machine maker as a gauge of AI spending

ASML’s sales move with the factories chipmakers decide to build, and right now those decisions are being made around AI. Its machines, called lithography scanners, shine light through a pattern and shrink it onto a silicon wafer, a step repeated for layer after layer of every chip. The most advanced of them, EUV machines (EUV stands for extreme ultraviolet light), are used for the smallest features on the processors that run AI models and on the fast memory packed beside them.

That puts ASML a step behind the money. In our reading the chain runs like this: a cloud company orders AI servers, the chip designers order more chips, and the chipmakers then decide whether to add factory space, which is the moment they call ASML. In its July prepared remarks, ASML said its foundry customers were adding capacity at the 3 nanometer node "in support of the latest generation of AI accelerators", and that memory makers were expanding because of supply challenges "driving up both DDR and HBM prices", HBM being the stacked memory used in AI chips.

The memory side shows how large those decisions have become. Micron, the US memory maker, reported net capital spending of $27.37 billion for its fiscal 2026, against $13.80 billion a year earlier, in its September results release, so it roughly doubled what it spent on plants and equipment. We covered what that means for memory prices in our article on Micron’s record quarter.

ASML’s growth is also faster than at three large US equipment makers, whose machines etch, deposit and inspect the layers ASML’s scanners pattern. The comparison uses each company’s latest reported quarter, which ends in different months.

Lam’s and KLA’s figures are our calculation from their releases (Lam, $6,722 million against $5,171 million; KLA, $3,658 million against $3,175 million), and Applied’s is the company’s own figure in its August release.

The order number ASML stopped publishing, and what took its place

ASML no longer reports how many new orders it took each quarter, so the clearest order signal this time sits in its balance sheet, and it is a large one. The last quarterly figure for new orders (bookings, in industry language) was €13.2 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025, with a backlog of €38.8 billion at the end of that year, in the January release and the prepared remarks of the same day. None of the three 2026 releases carries a bookings or backlog figure, and the third quarter release describes orders only in words, as "an order book momentum that continues to increase quarter on quarter this year".

The figure that does move is a line called contract liabilities, which records money a customer has paid, or been invoiced, before ASML has delivered what was bought. ASML shows it among its long-term liabilities, the part of the balance sheet for obligations expected to be settled more than a year after the date of the statement. For four quarters it sat between €3.4 billion and €3.6 billion. On September 27, 2026 it stood at €9.3 billion.

Show the data

Category	Value
Sep 2025	3.6B
Dec 2025	3.4B
Mar 2026	3.6B
Jun 2026	3.6B
Sep 2026	9.3B

The summary statements do not break this line down or explain its movement, so they cannot show how much of the rise is new money and how much could be amounts moved from the short-term part of the balance sheet, where current liabilities are reported as one total. What they do show fits fresh money arriving. Current liabilities rose from €22.2 billion to €24.9 billion, and the business brought in €11.8 billion of cash from operations, with €7.0 billion of it coming from changes in balance sheet items such as prepayments and receivables. ASML’s own measure of free cash flow was €11.4 billion, against €1.3 billion in the second quarter.

That timing lines up with what management said. Chief executive Christophe Fouquet described "a lot of order intake for 2028" in the results video, with "some strong interest to already place orders for 2029 and sometimes even 2030", and in our reading long-term prepayments are where money for a 2028 delivery would show up.

ASML’s 2026 forecast reaches the bottom of its 2030 range

ASML expects 2026 sales of €44 billion to €45 billion, which is already the bottom of the revenue range it has given for 2030. In its January 2026 prepared remarks ASML repeated the range it first gave at its 2024 Capital Markets Day, "a 2030 revenue opportunity between 44 billion euros and 60 billion euros", on the same day it guided 2026 sales to €34 billion to €39 billion.

The forecast has gone up three times since. ASML raised it to €36 billion to €40 billion in April, to €43 billion to €45 billion in July, and narrowed it to €44 billion to €45 billion now, which Dassen described as "an overall 36% increase of 2026 in comparison to 2025".

Show the data

Item	Low	High	Value
Jan 2026 outlook	34.0B	39.0B	36.5B
Apr 2026 outlook	36.0B	40.0B	38.0B
Jul 2026 outlook	43.0B	45.0B	44.0B
Oct 2026 outlook	44.0B	45.0B	44.5B
2030 range	44.0B	60.0B

For 2027 ASML gave no sales figure, and its message is about factory output. In its July release it said it planned "to add 30% to our 2026 low NA EUV capacity of around 65 for 2027" (low NA is the current generation of EUV), and the same 30% for its DUV immersion capacity of around 130 machines, the older but still widely used type. By our arithmetic that is room for about 85 EUV machines in 2027. In the October release ASML said that plan, and a further 30% it had been studying for 2028, will not fully meet demand, and that it is "investigating ways to increase capacity for 2028 beyond the 30% increase we previously communicated".

Fouquet put it more bluntly in the video: "30% in 2027, 30% in 2028 will not allow us to meet our customer demand." His reason sits with ASML’s customers, who "expect that their supply will not meet the demand at least until 2028", so they are adding factories faster.

Two other levers can lift 2027 sales without more new machines. Upgrades also give customers more output from machines they already own, which the release describes as providing "significant wafer capacity to our customers through our productivity upgrade portfolio". Service and upgrade sales for machines already installed rose 67.6% from a year earlier, and ASML expects about €3.7 billion of them in the fourth quarter alone. Prices also move: Dassen said ASML has completed its pricing conversations with key customers, and that the effect will become visible "partly in the course of 2027", with the full effect in 2028 and later. ASML plans to update its longer term views at a Capital Markets Day on June 10, 2027.

China’s share of ASML machine sales fell to 23%

China took 23% of ASML’s machine sales in the third quarter, down from 42% a year earlier, and the money shipped everywhere else roughly doubled. The shares come from the region charts in ASML’s investor presentations, measured by the country the machines were shipped to, and the slide for this quarter shows Taiwan at 32%, South Korea at 31% and the United States at 13%.

Show the data

Part	Value	Squares
Taiwan	32%	32
South Korea	31%	31
China	23%	23
United States	13%	13
Rest of Asia	1%	1

Turned into euros with each quarter’s machine sales, China’s purchases were about €1.9 billion against about €2.3 billion a year earlier, a fall of roughly a sixth, while machines shipped outside China came to about €6.4 billion against about €3.2 billion. The shares on the slides are rounded to whole percentages, so these are estimates that could be off by about €40 million either way.

Show the data

Item	Q3 2025	Q3 2026	Change
Shipped to China	2.3B	1.9B	-0.4B
Shipped elsewhere	3.2B	6.4B	+3.2B

The quarter to quarter path is bumpier than the year on year one. China’s share of machine sales was 36% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the January presentation, then 19% in the first quarter of 2026 and 14% in the second, according to the July presentation, before rising to 23% now.

With the same method, China’s machine purchases roughly doubled from the second quarter (about €0.9 billion to about €1.9 billion), while machines shipped elsewhere rose about 14%, which is why the share bounced. Dassen said the company still expects "the China part of the total business" to be around 20% in 2026, a share of all sales including services that is not directly comparable with one quarter’s machine sales. In its July prepared remarks ASML tied the Chinese demand mainly to "mainstream Logic", the less advanced processor chips.

Our reading is that the AI build-out shows up mostly in Taiwan, South Korea and the United States, the three destinations that together took 76% of the quarter’s machine sales, although a shipping destination does not say what the chips made there are used for. The release lists "restrictions on shipments of systems, including ordered systems, under export controls" among its risks, and in April ASML said its 2026 forecast range was wide enough to absorb "potential outcomes of ongoing discussions around export controls".

The profit jump, with and without the Mistral gain

Most of the profit jump came from the business itself, once the Mistral AI gain is set aside. Gross margin, the share of each sales euro left after the cost of building and servicing the machines, reached 57.5%, higher than in any of the seven quarters before it, which ranged from 51.6% to 54.0%.

Show the data

Item	Value
Q4 2024	51.7%
Q1 2025	54.0%
Q2 2025	53.7%
Q3 2025	51.6%
Q4 2025	52.2%
Q1 2026	53.0%
Q2 2026	54.0%
Q3 2026	57.5%

Dassen gave three reasons in the results video: higher volume, which spreads the factories’ fixed costs over more machines; a favourable mix of EUV and immersion machines; and the upgrade business, which he called "a very, very strong driver of the gross margin". ASML expects a gross margin of around 57% in the fourth quarter and around 56% for 2026, against 51% to 53% in January.

Operating income, which comes before the Mistral gain, was €5,172.8 million, or 44.4% of sales, against 32.8% a year earlier. Our estimate of net income without the gain is about €4.5 billion, still more than twice the €2.1 billion of the third quarter of 2025; the exact figure depends on how the gain was taxed, which the statements do not show.

Signals that would show the AI build-out slowing

ASML’s management describes its own factory output as the limit for 2027, and this quarter’s results show strong current activity. Without published order totals, nobody outside the company can measure how much of that future demand is already secured, so these are the readings that would show the picture changing.

• TSMC’s next quarterly report and its spending plans, since the results video says TSMC asked ASML to lead with it a group working on larger photomasks for High NA machines, the newest EUV type, and TSMC’s plans show how much new chip factory space is on the way.
• Whether ASML’s fourth quarter lands inside its €14.2 billion to €15.2 billion range when it next reports, and what it says then about 2027. Taking out the roughly €3.7 billion of service and upgrade sales it expects, that range implies about €10.5 billion to €11.5 billion of machine sales, by our estimate, against €8.4 billion in the third quarter.
• The contract liabilities line in that same report. A fall in the long-term part from €9.3 billion would be a question to put to ASML, since money can also move to the short-term part as a delivery date nears, and explicit word of cancellations or postponements would be the clearer signal.
• Any word of customers pushing deliveries back, which the release lists among its risks as "order cancellations, delays or push outs".
• Changes in export rules for the machines shipped to China, and whether ASML’s planned 30% capacity increase for 2027 arrives on time.

We also tracked how the wider story has swung between boom and bubble in our piece on how the AI narrative flipped, and how chip numbers split between volume and price in our look at TSMC and Samsung.

Method behind our figures

All ASML figures are in euros, under US accounting rules, from the company’s third quarter statements, investor presentations, release texts and the transcript of its results video, read on October 14, 2026. Growth rates are our arithmetic on the reported millions. Euro amounts by region multiply each quarter’s net system sales (€5,553.8 million in Q3 2025, €8,373.2 million in Q3 2026) by the ship-to shares on ASML’s region charts, which are rounded to whole percentages, so they are estimates. The net income estimate without the Mistral gain subtracts the €509.7 million gain in full (€4,450.7 million) or after tax at the quarter’s 16.1% rate (about €4,533 million). The 85 machine figure rounds 65 times 1.3, which is 84.5.

ASML’s investor call was scheduled for 09:00 ET on October 14, after our analysis was finished, so nothing said on it is included.

Frequently asked questions

The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation, or an endorsement of any particular investment strategy. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.

See more from StockTitan in Google Search and AI answers. Adds StockTitan as a preferred source · opens Google

Add on Google Not now