The Dutch manufacturer of equipment for the semiconductor industry ASML Holding has beaten the historical maximum capitalization reached in European stock markets, snatching the leadership that until now was held by Novo Nordisk. This milestone comes in a context of strong investor appetite for companies linked to the deployment of artificial intelligence data centers.
During the session, ASML's shares rose by up to 2.3%, raising its stock market value to 674 billion dollars (581.082 billion euros), according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. With this move, the firm surpasses the record that the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk had held since June 2024.
In September, the multinational based in the Netherlands had already positioned itself as the largest listed company on the European continent, overtaking the German software group SAP. Currently, its capitalization jointly exceeds that of the next two components of the ranking, HSBC and Roche.
In the last semester, ASML's stock market performance has been particularly outstanding, with an increase of more than 50%, which places it as the second best-performing stock within the Euro Stoxx 50 index in 2025.
Among the main buyers of ASML's lithography technology are Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung. The increase in their orders for chip production equipment has strained the Dutch company's capacity to respond to this volume of demand.
ASML registered a net profit of 2.757 billion euros in the first quarter of 2026, 2.9% less than in the same period of the previous year. Despite this year-on-year decline, the company decided to raise its revenue growth forecasts, relying on solid demand linked to AI.