ASML: the EUV read hit, the revenue number missed

Most investors will spend Wednesday asking whether ASML beat or missed by a few hundred million euros. We think that's the least interesting part of the quarter.

The bigger question is whether the AI infrastructure buildout is still accelerating, or whether customers are finally pausing after two years of extraordinary spending. That's what we'll be watching, and here's why.

On the headline revenue number, we actually agree with Street. Our Q2 estimate is €8.9B against frozen consensus of €9.0B, a gap of roughly 1%, well inside our in-line band.

The question is whether customers are still expanding leading-edge capacity faster than expected, or starting to pause while they absorb the capacity already ordered.

• Buildout continuing: ASML narrows its FY26 guidance upward and continues to report healthy memory and DUV demand.
• Slowdown case: guidance remains wide, China revenue falls materially below the guided 20%, or management becomes more cautious on orders and lead times.

The best clue comes from ASML's own customers.

ASML sits at the center of the leading-edge semiconductor supply chain, so its future demand is often visible through the investment plans of companies like TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, Intel and Micron before ASML reports.

Over the past few weeks:

• Micron: signed a multi-year EUV supply agreement with ASML, locking in future demand.
• SK Hynix: increased capex with a strong focus on EUV-enabled expansion, a direct pull on future EUV orders.
• Intel: raised capex as EUV production ramps, a sign of continued leading-edge investment.
• TSMC and Samsung: continue to support strong leading-edge investment over the coming year, keeping two of ASML's largest EUV buyers committed.

Taken together, those signals do not look like an industry preparing to slow down.

ASML quietly stopped reporting quarterly bookings in fiscal 2026. Backlog is now only disclosed annually.

That matters because bookings were one of the best early signals of future demand.

An EUV machine costs roughly €180M to €350M and can take well over a year from order to showing up as revenue. Revenue tells you what customers decided to buy a year or two ago. Bookings told you what they were deciding today.

That signal has disappeared.

So we built our own way of tracking it.

Instead of relying on a number ASML no longer reports, we estimate how many EUV systems the company is on pace to recognize during 2026 using the information it still discloses: Q1 EUV revenue, system pricing, lithography shipments, High-NA deliveries, backlog and our own ledger of named customer orders.

Today, Tessara's read is:

• ASML plan: 60+ Low-NA systems in 2026 (up from 44 in 2025)
• Tessara estimate: ~69 total EUV systems
• Range: 56 to 72
• Status: tracking instrument, not a forecast

One important point: our estimate includes both Low-NA and High-NA systems, while ASML's official target only covers Low-NA. Adjusted to the same basis, our estimate sits very close to ASML's own plan.

We are not claiming to see a hidden surge in machine demand. Our historical error on this model averages eight machines across six simulated pre-print runs, so we treat it as a tracking instrument rather than a forecast.

Its value is that it gives us a way to follow the EUV buildout every quarter, even though the market no longer has a bookings number to rely on.

Wednesday is its first real test.

This is the framework we are using, stated plainly.