ASML reports on Wednesday morning.
Most investors will spend Wednesday asking whether ASML (the company holding biggest bottleneck in the AI buildout, EUV machines) 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.
Our view at a glance:
Metric | Value |
|---|---|
Revenue (our model) | €8.9B |
Street consensus | €9.0B |
Stance | In line |
Range (p10-p90) | €8.5B to €9.3B |
What decides it | FY26 guidance direction |
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.
Today, we lean toward the buildout continuing.
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 tool 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.
Tessara Pro users are able to read our locked pre-call here: tessara.tech/earnings/asml
The number the market no longer gets
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 on EUVs is… « paywalled content »
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