The key that ultimately made it possible was the light source, and ASML is the only company that sells these light sources. ASML didn't invent the light source entirely on its own; there were a lot of ideas for light sources floating around and the only one that turned out to work was laser-induced plasma from tin microdroplets, which sounds completely crazy but it works [0]. ASML perfected that process (with -- to be fair -- some investment from Intel).
[0] https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/li...
Intel did fight EUV with a technology called SAQP which ultimately turned out not to work as well as EUV, but they were researching EUV at the same time. Here are some more historical articles about Intel's work on EUV in the past. Note the dates.
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-achieves-majo...
https://semiengineering.com/why-euv-is-so-difficult/
https://www.eetimes.com/intel-developing-euv-pellicle/
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276376-intel-reportedl...
Was it just a matter of luck that ASML nailed the right one or was it the nature of exploring some riskier alternative (as you said "which sounds completely crazy but it works")?
There were several different light source ideas tried. Some at US national laboratories. Tin plasma was known to work but it left so much debris that it gummed up the optics so it was forgotten for a while. The key turned out to be tin microdroplets.
https://www.optica-opn.org/home/articles/volume_29/march_201...
Like anything, some of their PHDs were like “no that’s probably not going to work because xyz” and they trusted said PHDs.
It’s just science. It’s hard to predict.
Once it became clear that AMD and ARM (and by extension TSMC) were eating their lunch, they had great difficulty pivoting because they lacked the talent and the organizational will to do so -- at least until Gelsinger took charge. I have a lot of respect for Gelsinger and I think he just might turn it around.
Yet another example in a long history that modeling your talent pipeline as a JIT supply chain does not work in high cognitive input settings. This is a general unsolved management challenge: capturing sufficiently granular and comprehensive institutional knowledge to be able to efficiently restart organizations that rely upon it years down the line.
I don't think we will ever solve it until we learn how to share human mind states. The complexity of these high cognitive input activities at large scale has surpassed the ability of our capabilities to transfer comprehension between minds using conventional information transfer techniques (primarily written word and audio video). Even were I to guarantee the capture of all information at sufficient granularity, the only way to QA that is to de novo staff up a brand-new parallel organization, and have them reproduce the original organization's accomplishments. No one is ever funded for that.
This is a really interesting problem space for me because I suspect it is a dimension of technical debt very rarely explored because our species has not had to really grapple with it before as our technological progression has been slow enough we could "good enough" brute force our way through it whenever it came up in less severe forms.
The race to the bottom of physics is not a long ride.
A cursory Google search results in multiple search hits from recent news pieces announcing Intel buying their EUV kits from ASML.
If Intel is handing out small fortunes to ASML to deliver a machine that in the past Intel was expected to develop in-house, that does not sound like a success story.
Here's a Reddit thread on the topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/comments/miar30/why_is_in...
Obviously, they are kind of big enough to do both — make a half hearted attempt and fight it all the same due to some internal politics. However, for something this existential, one would think that the smart people and the leadership would try to put some focus on the field. Was it that bad? Really, looking for some insight on what really went down.