Company insights: ASML

At McInroy & Wood we keep a keen eye on emerging technologies across the globe.

Advances in artificial intelligence have dominated news headlines and global equity markets in recent years.

And rightly so. The technology has the potential to affect nearly every aspect of our lives.

When ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, it was estimated to have reached over 100m people in just 2 months. It took Facebook over 4 years to reach the same figure!

McInroy & Wood's approach is to seek out companies that provide essential technology and services across AI supply chains.

One example is ASML, a Dutch manufacturer of equipment used to make microchips.

The company has a monopoly in the most advanced products in this area.

Its machines project extremely strong and narrow ultraviolet light onto silicon wafers, allowing intricate microscopic patterns to be printed before they are turned into electronic circuits.

Packing more electronic circuits onto each microchip means they can process more of the complex calculations used in artificial intelligence models.

At the same time, ASML’s technology has helped shrink the size of each chip, so more of them can fit into phones, computers and data centres.

Smaller chips mean more than enabling smaller devices. They produce less heat, unlocking better energy efficiency, longer battery life on our phones and cooler data centres.

ASML is a key supplier to all computer chip manufacturers, so over the longer term they look set to prosper irrespective of which AI software successfully becomes mainstream or the hardware that powers it.