Samsung, SK Hynix accept ASML's 10% price hike in parts, report says

This is ASML's most sophisticated pricing maneuver in a decade—converting monopoly rents from capex into opex. New-tool pricing is negotiable through volume commitments; parts pricing is not. It is a recurring, non-discretionary cost tied directly to uptime, compounding across the entire installed base and eroding wafer-level gross margins year over year. The 2027 effective date is the real tell. That is precisely when High-NA EUV service cycles begin to scale and Korea's HBM fabs enter their heaviest maintenance windows. ASML is pricing the moment of maximum dependency. For Samsung and SK Hynix, the calculus is brutal: reject the hike, risk multi-week downtime in a market where HBM supply is already constrained, and bleed share to Micron. Accept, and you lock in a structural cost disadvantage versus foundry peers who amortize tool costs across multiple customers. Rational, but permanently costly. The precedent matters more than the 10%. If ASML extracts this from Korea's parts spend, the same logic extends to TSMC, Intel, and eventually fabs in Taiwan, China and mainland China. Expect accelerated mature-node capacity shifts toward Nikon and Canon, and a quiet but determined acceleration of China's domestic lithography push—not because it is viable at EUV, but because parts dependency is now a quantified, priced strategic vulnerability.