A California startup is raising $350 million to crack one of the most entrenched monopolies in tech: ASML's grip on extreme ultraviolet chipmaking equipment.
xLight, chaired by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, is building its own EUV light source — the component that fires the ultraviolet pulses used to etch circuit patterns onto silicon. ASML currently supplies essentially every advanced chip fabricator on the planet with this technology, making it a single point of failure for the entire semiconductor supply chain. xLight's pitch is that a competitive alternative is both technically possible and strategically necessary.
The raise signals something broader: deep-tech hardware is back in fashion with venture investors. AI's insatiable appetite for compute has reminded the industry that software runs on physical things — chips, lasers, and lithography machines — and that whoever controls those physical things holds enormous leverage. A $350 million bet on EUV optics would have looked eccentric five years ago; today it looks like table stakes.
Gelsinger's involvement adds credibility, though it also raises an eyebrow — his tenure at Intel ended with the company in serious trouble, and rebuilding complex optical manufacturing from scratch is a different challenge than running a legacy chipmaker. Whether xLight can translate venture capital into working hardware that fabs will actually adopt remains the only question that matters.