ASML reported €8.8 billion in net sales and €2.8 billion in net income for the first quarter of 2026 on 15 April, and lifted its full-year revenue guidance to €36 billion to €40 billion, up from a previous range of €34 billion to €39 billion. The Dutch lithography monopoly's official press release attributed the upgrade to AI-related infrastructure investment, with chief executive Christophe Fouquet telling investors that "demand for chips is outpacing supply" and that customers were accelerating capacity expansion plans for 2026 and beyond.
The numbers behind the upgrade
Gross margin came in at 53 per cent for the quarter, with second-quarter sales guided to between €8.4 billion and €9.0 billion at a gross margin of 51 to 52 per cent. Earnings per share of €7.15 beat consensus by a wide margin. The company sells extreme ultraviolet lithography systems used to make the leading-edge logic chips on which AI training and inference workloads run. There is no substitute supplier.
The order intake split is what drives the 2026 upgrade. ASML's largest customers, TSMC, Samsung, and Intel Foundry, are all expanding leading-edge capacity to absorb hyperscaler AI chip orders, with Nvidia, Google, AWS and Microsoft accounting for the bulk of that volume. Each EUV system ships at a list price near €200 million. The High-NA generation that began deliveries in late 2025 sits closer to €400 million.
The export control overhang
The upgrade landed against a backdrop of fresh US export-control proposals. The bipartisan MATCH Act, introduced earlier in April, would broaden controls beyond EUV and into deep ultraviolet systems, including older models that are currently unrestricted. ASML's share price fell roughly 3.4 per cent on 2 April when the MATCH Act draft surfaced, before recovering on the Q1 numbers.
The political question for The Hague is how far the European Commission's Chips Act framework, which targets a doubling of Europe's share of global semiconductor production to 20 per cent by 2030, can absorb the operational consequences of US-led restrictions. ASML has been quietly consistent in arguing that broader DUV controls would cede mid-end logic and memory production to non-aligned suppliers without slowing China's leading-edge ambitions.
What this means for European AI buyers
For European enterprise AI procurement, ASML's guidance reads two ways. The optimistic read is that capacity expansion at TSMC and Samsung will tighten the gap between AI compute demand and supply by late 2026, easing the cost-per-token economics that have squeezed European AI startups operating without sovereign hyperscaler partnerships. The cautious read is that capacity additions are pre-sold to American hyperscalers, with European buyers further down the allocation queue.
Fouquet's remark that order conversations now extend beyond 2026 supports the second read. Procurement teams at European banks, telecoms and utilities should plan for a tight inference-capacity market through 2027, with corresponding pressure on multi-year cloud-AI contract pricing.
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