What is no longer mentioned is that ASML made another big gamble at the time they started on EUV. They decided to make an all-in-one chip making machine that took silicon and output chips (instead of matrices of chip circuits laid out on a wafer).

On paper, the machine would save a lot of money for the fab houses. IRL: no one asked for it, and no one was willing to risk their entire production on a single, untried, swiss army knife of a fabricator.

The whole program was a wash. People were reassigned and the project died a very quick death. ASML lost a ton of money on this misguided attempt, but not enough to choke them.

So, they rolled the dice twice, and one gamble paid off handsomely. If it went the other way, they'd be a smaller company, and Moore's Law would be overshooting reality. If neither paid off, they'd be DOA.

> reshaped society

Invalidate all of ASML's patents = get cheaper chips, sooner.

It is intellectual property which gives some of us the ability to build these things and sell them to others - get rid of this phony concept and we can have more nice things...