Greet Storms, ASML's senior vice-president for High-NA EUV product management, used an advanced-process forum at SEMICON Taiwan to update the fleet numbers for the company's most expensive machine. Cumulative wafer exposure across the EXE systems has passed 1.35 million wafers. A certified EXE:5200B hit 135 wafers per hour. Fleet availability is 84%, targeted at 90% by the end of 2026 and 93% thereafter.
What 135 WPH is a measurement of
It is an acceptance-test result — the qualification run a tool passes on installation — not steady-state fab throughput. The distinction is not pedantry: acceptance conditions are chosen to demonstrate capability, and real production throughput is set by layer mix, mask changes and uptime. The onward figures in the roadmap are further from reality still: 160 WPH on the EXE:5200C, 175 on the 5200D, 180 on the 5400E by the end of the decade, and above 210 WPH in a faster mode. These are goals, with the light source going from 600W to 1,000W.
What 1.35 million wafers is not
It is cumulative exposure by the whole fleet since deployment, R&D runs included. It is not production output and it does not correspond to shipped devices.
The date error going around
Coverage is treating "first high-volume logic product on High-NA" as today's news. It is not: that product is Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 on Intel 18A, and ASML announced the milestone in a press release on 15 July 2026. What is new today is the counters — fleet size, exposure total, availability, acceptance throughput. Dating the HVM milestone to 1 September is simply wrong.
Who the customers are, and are not
Taiwanese reporting of the same forum puts 10 systems in operation at four customers, with three more shipping or installing. ASML did not name them. Intel is public, and SK hynix has installed an EXE:5200B at its M16 DRAM fab; adding TSMC or Samsung to the list is invention, and TSMC has publicly held off on High-NA purchases. Storms also suggested High-NA could serve up to five future 2D DRAM nodes — a speaker's estimate carried by one outlet, not a company commitment.