ASML is a safe long-term holding for at least 3-5 years due to its exclusive Zeiss mirror relationship and ability to benefit from lithography innovations like free electron lasers.

Now it's memory. Now it's the EUV ASML tools to build chips.

remember and the other thing the other big thing that's hard to nail as well as is there a way of them overcoming the ASML lithography tooling with a different approach? Cuz that seems to me like the biggest and hardest thing that like if there's a monopoly on the planet them and Zeiss are it.

Yeah, and I don't know you know Zeiss is going to be a really hard one. So, ASML their core you know technology is the way that they're able to produce this EUV light which is just extremely extremely short wavelengths of light that are extremely precise

um and there's whole lot of engineering and science voodoo magic that goes into that and it involves machine gunning little tiny tin droplets through a vacuum and shooting them with lasers a whole bunch of times and it's it's just ridiculous what they've been able to do.

But, it's not the only way to produce light at those very small wavelengths in a consistent way. Um one of the things that there's been a lot of talk about for a number of years is called free electron lasers.

And so, this is something that Elon confirmed that the Terafab is looking at um trying to put into production use.

And if they could replace the light source in existing ASML machines um you know the the biggest hardest most complicated piece of the ASML machine is this part that produces the EUV light.

And if they could replace that with um a free electron laser, you could actually have one. So, right now in every individual So, in every existing ASML machine there is that tin droplet machine gun EUV light source machine.

And one of the things about free electron lasers is that they're relatively large. They're not um so, it's basically you know, if you think of a particle accelerator, for anyone who knows what a particle accelerator is, are these big giant rings and they are they use a whole lot of power to accelerate very small particles of um atoms.

So, whether that's photons or electrons or um all these things to extremely high speeds. So, a free electron laser is kind of a smaller version of that. Uh usually it's done in a straight line, so they're linear um particle accelerators rather than circular ones.

And they they don't have to necessarily be very long, um but if you want to create large amounts of EUV light, you do get into larger machines. Um and it's just not really pragmatic to put those inside of one ASML machine.

But, what you can do is you can create one of these large free electron lasers that it it concentrates um electricity along a line, and then it vibrates the electrons side to side as they are moving forward.

And the side-to-side vibration that it's achieving using magnets mostly, uh creates then it makes those electrons emit light photons. And depending on the frequency that they're wiggling them back and forth, they can specifically tune the wavelength of the photons that's coming out of those.

And so, that's how they're able to produce light at a very specific wavelength. Um and then they can take that and split it off, and they can extract the light from this electron beam.

And so, they can do this um in a a large way and create a centralized production of EU UV light almost like electricity, and then they can pipe it into individual ASML ASML lithography machines.

And so, I think that's the long-term plan is to create a large free electron laser here at the Terafab and then to use that one free electron laser to supply every single lithography machine on the whole campus.

Just like you know, almost think of it like a power plant that supplies electricity to all of the homes in an area. This would be you know, the light power plant of all of the lithography machines in the manufacturing facility.

So, with all these changes and disruption, what I'm trying to get at here is you've got all these players, you got the Microns, the Nvidias, and the TSMCs, and the ASMLs, etc.

Um So I would think that this would be something that layers on top of more likely than just completely eliminates you know, companies like ASML, companies like Nvidia. So like the free electron laser thing that I just mentioned you know, the other part of the lithography machine is still really hard and really complicated and it involves those very special Zeiss mirrors that

then if ASML has the prime relationship with Zeiss to put this into a machine, then that still creates a lot of surface area even for Zeiss or I mean for ASML to be a beneficiary like because the the bottleneck of this tin droplet EUV is eliminated, maybe they can actually sell more machines than they sold before and just focus on doing the all of the things that are involved in moving the chips and the I mean the wafers and the laser back and forth to achieve all these fine grain details on these low low resolution um features for for chips and logic.

he said that the Chinese are roughly 15 years away from building their own cutting-edge versions of what ASML has because of their impossibly complex mirrors you referred to. I'm in bed with ASML and they're going to keep me rich for the next 15 years till I retire type of thing.

and that relationship with Zeiss that ASML has, I think, continues to put them in a really good position for at least the next 3 to 5 years, you know, potentially longer than that.

Um I would I would feel very comfortable as an ASML shareholder over those time frames, even knowing, you know, all this stuff that Elon's working on with Terafab. And And there rumor has it, too, that Elon has secured ASML product.

Now they kind of have left building out their own compute. Now maybe building out their chip is kind of a stepping into it. But the big question is after all this noise, you're not worried about your Nvidia position, you're not worried about Micron, you not worried about ASML at least for the next 3 years.