EUV Lithography ☆

Extreme-ultraviolet lithography fires lasers at tin droplets 50,000 times a second to make plasma that emits 13.5 nm light, steered by the flattest mirrors ever manufactured. Only ASML builds these ~$180M machines; every chip on this site below 7 nm depends on them, and their export to China is banned — making one Dutch factory the choke point of the entire AI supply chain.