7:00The infrastructure spend from the hyperscalers and the kind of deal making that OpenAI has done, almost a trillion dollars worth of deals committed by that one company alone, which isn't making a profit this year. That makes sense to you?
Well, when ASML introduced its EUV machines, it helped customers move from 7 nanometer chips down to the 3 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 are aimed 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 Fouquet. In an exclusive interview recorded on November the 14th at ASML's headquarters, Fouquet explained why no other company on the planet can do what his can.
Lithography will always be there, because you cannot do anything without lithography and there will always be the wish to get better lithography. Better lithography means better resolution, better accuracy and better productivity. We're going to work on those three axes for many, many years. If we look at lithography at ASML today, thanks to EUV, we most probably know what to do for our customer for the next 10 to 15 years. And in the next 10 to 15 years, we'll still see major innovation in lithography in order to work with our customer on cost and transistor density. So that's the first thing. We do EUV today. We just talked about high NA. We may at some point also introduce an even higher numerical aperture tool, which we call HyperNA, that's the 0.75 tool. HyperNA comes most probably in the middle of the next decade. So we still have time, we're preparing for it because we have to look long term.
You're also pushing into advanced packaging or 3D packaging. This is essentially where you get the components, instead of laying them out flat urban sprawl style, you build them up a bit like a skyscraper. Correct? What is the importance of that? How significant will that be for ASML and why focus on that packaging?
Yeah, so two reasons why this is becoming important. First, our customers are continuing to drive for more transistor density. Moore's law calls for doubling transistor density every two years, and this has been going on for many years and still keeps going. In fact, if you look at AI customers, you mentioned Nvidia before, they want even more than that. They would like the number of transistors to go up by a factor of 16 every two years. That's what we have seen happening in the last two to three years. So you're going completely off Moore's law and you need even more transistors. Now, we still use lithography to try to put as many transistors as possible per unit of area, but that's not enough. If you cannot get enough transistors just by scaling, then you also have to do 3D integration.
On AI, you made a big step by investing almost one half billion US dollars in Mistral, which is one of the leading large language model companies in Europe, a competitor to OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic. You've taken about a 10% stake with that deal. Why?
Well, we see AI as a huge opportunity for ASML. We invest a lot in R&D, four and a half billion euros every year, to develop our product. We invest a lot in hardware and also a lot in software. We saw that when it comes to development cycles, AI could help us enormously with the software. Like many companies, we ship our machines to customers and have people maintain those machines in the field. We write a huge amount of procedures, spending a lot of time describing on paper how our tools work so people can deal with them. AI can help us reduce the time our engineers spend on that, freeing them to do other things like 3D integration. So we saw a major efficiency opportunity with AI. More importantly, we also believe AI can improve our product because our product generates tons of data.
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