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This week’s episode is a light-week update that focuses on what the newest factory and financing signals say about Extreme Ultraviolet lithography. The key story is not a dramatic new scanner milestone, but the spread of EUV into more geographies, more product classes, and more pre-committed capital. TSMC’s Japan approval, Intel’s commercial 18A launch, and SK hynix’s financing move all point in the same direction: EUV is becoming an operational replication problem.

Key takeaways

- Taiwan approved TSMC’s plan to bring 3nm production to its second Kumamoto fab, with equipment installation and mass production targeted for 2028.

- Local reporting tied the approved Kumamoto 3nm plan to roughly 15,000 12-inch wafers per month of capacity.

- Intel said Core Ultra Series 3 with vPro is the first commercial PC platform built on Intel 18A and is expected to support more than 125 designs.

- SK hynix made a confidential filing for a U.S. listing that could raise roughly $9.6 billion to $14.4 billion, adding a financing angle to its recent EUV capacity push.

- ASML said in its 2025 annual report that it expects EUV revenue to increase significantly in 2026 because of advanced logic and DRAM demand.

- This was a light week for fresh EUV datapoints: there were no major new official High-NA yield, uptime, or shipment disclosures from ASML, Samsung, Micron, or Rapidus in the last seven days.

Glossary

Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography — A chip-patterning technology that uses 13.5-nanometer light for advanced semiconductor layers.

High Numerical Aperture (High-NA) EUV — The next EUV platform generation, using a larger numerical aperture to improve resolution.

3nm — A leading-edge logic process class that uses EUV on critical layers, despite the name not matching a literal feature size.

Intel 18A — Intel’s angstrom-era manufacturing node, using RibbonFET transistors and backside power delivery.

Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) — Mainstream volatile memory used in servers, PCs, mobile devices, and as the base technology for HBM stacks.

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) — Stacked memory designed to feed very high data rates to artificial intelligence and high-performance accelerators.

12-inch wafer — The 300-millimeter silicon wafer format used for modern high-volume advanced chip production.