ASML closed Wednesday, June 3, with a market value of $668 billion, making the Dutch chip equipment maker the most valuable company in European history. The move pushed the company past Novo Nordisk's $650 billion record from June 2024 and left ASML as the clearest market favorite in Europe's technology sector.
Investors are not buying a slogan here. They are paying for the idea that ASML can keep shipping the extreme ultraviolet machines that make leading-edge chip production possible, with TSMC, Samsung and Intel all dependent on its tools to print the smallest logic patterns.
That demand burst came after two major banks turned more positive on the company. JPMorgan lifted its price target to €1,900 from €1,515 and kept an Overweight rating, while Morgan Stanley raised its target to €1,660 from €1,400 and also stayed Overweight. JPMorgan analyst Sandeep Deshpande said ASML could deliver more than 110 low-NA EUV systems without adding new building capacity, a sharp contrast with the roughly 90 units investors had previously treated as the ceiling.
ASML has already crossed another symbolic line, passing SAP to become Europe's largest listed company, and its shares are up roughly 50% this year. The valuation now puts the company ahead of HSBC and Roche combined, though it still sits below the trillion-dollar mark that several U.S. chip names have already reached.
The company’s near-term ability to meet that optimism remains the key test. Morgan Stanley said its greater confidence came from comments at ASML's April annual general meeting, when the company outlined an expansion at the Brainport Industries Campus in Eindhoven. Construction there is set to begin in the third quarter of 2026, and that timetable matters because more output is the difference between a record valuation and one that can keep climbing. ASML tools run from about $235 million for a low-NA system to roughly $380 million for the High-NA EXE:5200B, a price range that helps explain why every extra machine can move the market so sharply.
For now, the numbers point in one direction: Wall Street thinks ASML may be able to do more than investors believed, and the stock is trading like it. The unanswered question is how many EUV systems it can actually ship before the next wave of chip demand meets the limits of its factories.
