I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commenting on.

Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.

On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.

And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.

In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

> In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

You're looking this purely through an economic lens, while in reality geopolitical factors play a huge role in what ASML can and cannot do. The US government would likely take an extremely dim view of any new external competitor popping up for their chip foundry industry (especially with all the new US plants being built or planned) and would lean heavily on their vassal/ally the Netherlands to prevent this. Unlike with China, the US has more leverage over the Netherlands[1]

The US security state and US tech giants are joined at the hip, as they have been since the beginning of Silicon Valley[1], right through the Snowden revelations through to the present day[2].

[1] https://nltimes.nl/2026/08/20/us-preparing-force-netherlands...

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/sect...