The largest company you probably have never heard of is
$ASML
Ranked 19th in the world by market cap, yet most people have no clue who they are and what they do.
They make lithography machines, the printers that print circuits onto silicon wafers.
No ASML → no chips → no GPUs → no AI → no crypto
They’re the literal bottleneck of modern technology. Nobody else can make what they make.
Their top machine (EUV) costs around $200M each, takes 12–18 months to build, and there are only a few hundred on the planet.
Only giants like TSMC, Intel, and Samsung can even buy them.
That means ASML is a monopoly in one of the most critical links of the global tech supply chain
They have no competition but they are enabling all other tech giants. Not only enabling, but they even depend on them - Nvidia, AMD, Apple, etc...
Financially, they’re a beast:
• Gross margins around 50%
• Backlog >€35B (more than a year of production already sold)
• Revenue growth averaging 20–30% annually
• Deep moat, no real substitutes
If you believe that:
- AI continues to explode
- Chips remain the backbone of every industry
- Crypto keeps scaling and needs hardware (nodes, data centers, GPUs)
Then ASML is one of the purest AI plays you can make
It’s kinda the “Layer 0” of the hardware world
With a P/E of 33 it’s not cheap, but given the growth and its monopoly status, it's not that insane.
I'd even argue that they have the ability to drastically increase prizes without demand budging much at all because of the backlog and the incredibly high demand.
Of course, there are risks:
- Heavy reliance on TSMC (a Taiwan risk angle)
- US/China export restrictions
- Cyclical nature of chip spending
- Long production cycles = slower reaction to demand shifts
But unless the world stops caring about chips, ASML’s dominance isn’t going anywhere.
I've owned this stock for about 6 months now and see no reason yet to sell it.