Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Well. When ASML introduced its EUV machines, it helped customers move from seven nanometer chips down to the three nanometer chips now used by the likes of Nvidia and Apple. Its next big test is whether it can transition to what's known as high numerical aperture lithography or high NA. These newer EUV machines raimed at pushing chips below two nanometers, giving them even more capabilities considered crucial for future AI applications. The person
leading this effort is Chief executive Officer Christophe Fouke. In an exclusive interview recorded on November fourteenth at ASML's headquarters, Fuke explained why no other company on the planet can do what his can.
Lithography will always be there, right because you can not do any sake with lithography, and there will always be the wish to get better lithography. Better lithography means better resolution, better accuracy, and better productivity, and we're going to work
basically on those three axes for many, many years. If we look at lithography in CML today, thanks to UV, we most really know what to do for our customer for the next ten to fifteen years and the next ten to fifteen years, we'll still see major innovation in lithography in order to continue to work with our customer on cost and transistor density. So that's the first sake we do lone today. We just talked about i NA.
We may at some point of time or so to introduce even higher numerical aperture tool which we call like CURNA. That's the point seventy five tool. Basically we hyper and so.
When does hyper and I come mostly mean over.
The next decade, So we still have time. We still have time, but that's still something we are preparing for because as you said, we have to look long term.
You're also pushing into advanced packaging or three D packaging, and this is essentially where you get the components. Instead of laying them out flat urban spool style, you build them up a bit like a skyscraper. Cort. What is the importance of that? How significant will will that be for SML and why focus on that packaging?
Yeah, to reason why this is becoming important. So the first thing is our customer are continuing to drive for more transistoror density. So the most law we usually refer to is calling for doubling transition density every two years, and this has been going on for many years. It's still keep going. In fact, if you look at AI customers you mentioned NVIDA before, they aren't even more than that. So they don't want to get the transition density to
double every two years. They were like the number of transistors to go up by a factor of sixteen every two years. That's what we have seen happening in the last two three years. So you're going completely off Moore's law and you need even more transistor Now. We still use lithography to try to put as many transistors as possible per unit of area, but that's not enough. And if you cannot get enough transistor as you show doing this, then you also.
Have to do that. On AI. You made a big step by investing almost one and a half billion US dollars in Mistral, which is one of the leading large language model companies in Europe. Certainly a competitor sort of likes about pen Ai and Gemini and Anthropic. You're taking about a ten percent stake with that Dale Why.
Well, we saw AI as also a huge opportunity for SML if you look at a SML. We invest a lot in R and D four and a half billion euro every year to develop our product, and of course we invest a lot in hardware. We also invest a lot of software, and we saw that when it comes to development cycle, AI could help us enormously with the software, of course like many company, but for us to be able to ship our machine to our customer and have people to maintain those machines on the field, we're writing
a huge amount of procedure. We spend a lot of time describing on paper our tool walk so that people can deal with it, and they also AI can help us to really reduce the time our engineers spend on that so that we free them to do other things like, for example, free the integration. So we saw a major major efficiency opportunity with AI. More importantly, we also believe that AI can improve our product because our product generates tons of data.
Are we in an AI bubble?
Well, you know, when people talk about AI bubble, I think I don't know exactly what they mean, and usually I say, there's two ways to look at it. If you look at the industry, I don't think there is a bubble. So the impact of AI in industry is just starting and the impact on the industry will be positive for many, many years to come. So there there is no bubble. I think that the value of AI, the industrial value of AI, is extremely high, and this
will be developing over time. There's no bubble because, like I said, we're just starting. Sometimes people talk about a bubble in a reference to the stock market because we have seen some company getting extremely high valuation as a resource of the excitement of AI.
There.
I think what you will see is more players coming over time. So initially a few company where I would say very much the only winner out of AI because of the demand. Because industry, the industrial demand will be so high, we need more players, and you will see more and more company designing chips, designing AI, product manufacturing chips, et cetera, et cetera. That could create, of course some change on the stock market, but you know the two are a bit unrelated.
Because I can make me three hundred million dollars just this year along from hyper scales, maybe four hundred million next year. Yeah, that translates into real orders for your kids in the years ahead. You start to see it over.
Time, and sometimes you know the last few months. I used to joke with some of our investors because they told us, well, you know, two ndred billion here, five ulred billion here. I say, well, I still don't have the equation to translate doorse order into order for us, and it takes a bit of time, but you're right. Over time that demand translate into cheap demand to our customer. This translate into a need for more capacity, and this translate into demand for ISML and our peers in the industry.
The infrastructure span from the hyper scales and the kind of deal making. The open AI has done almost a trillion dollars worth of deals committed just by that one company alone, which isn't making a profit this year.
That makes sense to you, Well, I think the investment makes sense overhaul, because you cannot play in AI without investing in hyperscaler. And there may be even a few cycle of investment because the investment today is done on
certain chips. The chips in two three years from now, if you look at Nvidia announcement, there will be a lot more powerful and people may be tempted again in twenty twenty seven to invest again in Hyperscaler to make use of those chips, so you have different cycle and you have a bit of a harm rest because if you don't invest today, you're out right. It's true for company. I think it's true for government. You cannot not play in AI and I think that's why you have this huge backlog of demand.
What you touched on on one part of this, which is that the pace of innovation, and it makes me think of depreciation around some of these assets, particularly when you spend heavily on Blackwell and then we've got Rubin coming up for it as one example. Good news for you because you benefit from that increased investment that's gonna have to follow that, but some are gonna get burned by that depreciating asset, presumably.
Could be I think, you know, it's a bit what I said. You have a certain landscape when you start. The portity is big. You would see more and more players. Will everyone win, I don't know, but the importity is such that there would be more and more people entering the business, and time would say makes the right turn, or makes the right decision, the right investment, et cetera,
et cetera. But the opportunity will I think on the short term you will see first more player, and then at some point you may see a consolidation or a change. This is very naturally in this scale of industry, but it's too big for people to not want to play in today.
As a malcio, Christopher Fouquet