Intel ships the first high-volume High-NA EUV chips
Intel has become the first chipmaker to ship high-volume logic chips made with ASML's High-NA EUV lithography, beating TSMC and Samsung to using the technology at scale.
The milestone, confirmed by ASML in mid-July 2026, covers selected layers of Intel's 18A process node used to build parts of its Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptop chips. The High-NA wafers are coming out of Intel's fab in Hillsboro, Oregon, at yields Intel says already match its existing EUV platform.
High-NA (0.55 numerical aperture) EUV prints chip features finer than anything else in mass production, and each scanner costs around 400 million dollars. Whoever masters it first sets the pace for the next few process nodes.
Why it matters: after years of falling behind, this is a concrete comeback signal for Intel in the chip race, and it reshuffles the pecking order at the leading edge.
Related: Samsung's chip investment and DeepSeek's own inference chip.