The World's Most Complex Machine

Hey, author of the piece here. Glad people seem to have enjoyed it. If you're looking for more sources on ASML/EUV I put together a bibliography of things I looked at while writing the piece https://neilhacker.com/2026/04/28/asml-article-bibliography/

It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.

For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

Wow. I see the head of Charlie Chaplin inside the center machine unit. Do you see it?

> To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.

Is this just restating the size of the same shipment three times?

> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.

Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?

> These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.

I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)

I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.

Rule of thumb: when something is being called "The World's Most Complex Machine", its either CERN's Large Hadron Collider or an ASML EUV machine.

In this case, its the latter.

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

They might be the most complex mass-produced commercial machines but the Large Hadron Collider has a plausible claim to the title of "world's most complex machine" https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-la...

I'm pretty sure that's the most bizarre light source on the planet: https://youtu.be/B2482h_TNwg?t=929

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?

I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

and yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain

It looks complicated but I suspect that 90% of what I see in that picture is just a giant refrigerator.