ASML Raises 2026 Revenue Guidance to 36-40 Billion Euros as AI Infrastructure Spending Lifts Q1 Sales to 8.8 Billion

Overview

ASML Holding reported first-quarter 2026 results on April 15 and used the same release to raise its full-year revenue outlook, citing accelerating capacity expansion at its largest logic and memory customers in response to sustained AI-infrastructure spending. The Dutch lithography specialist, whose extreme-ultraviolet tools are effectively required for every leading-edge logic and high-bandwidth memory node in production today, said its customers are “accelerating their capacity expansion plans for 2026 and beyond.”

What We Know

ASML posted Q1 2026 net sales of 8.8 billion euros and net income of 2.8 billion euros, with a gross margin of 53.0 percent and basic earnings per share of 7.15 euros, according to the company’s official Q1 2026 press release. In the same release, CEO Christophe Fouquet said “the semiconductor industry’s growth outlook continues to solidify, driven by ongoing AI-related infrastructure investments,” and that customer demand is prompting faster capacity commitments through a mix of new-tool deliveries and upgrades to previously shipped systems.

The company raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of 36 to 40 billion euros, with gross margin between 51 and 53 percent, per the same Q1 2026 release. For the second quarter, ASML guided to 8.4 to 9.0 billion euros in net sales at a 51 to 52 percent gross margin, with R&D costs of roughly 1.2 billion euros and SG&A costs of about 0.3 billion euros per quarter.

ASML also said it intends to declare a total 2025 dividend of 7.50 euros per ordinary share, a 17 percent increase over 2024, and disclosed that it repurchased roughly 1.1 billion euros of its own stock in the first quarter under its 2026-2028 buyback program, according to the same Q1 release. The installed-base management line, which covers service revenue and upgrades of previously delivered systems, contributed 2.488 billion euros in the quarter.

The raised 2026 outlook comes against the backdrop of a record backlog that ASML itself had already flagged at the start of the year. When the company reported full-year 2025 results in January, it disclosed a 38.8 billion euro order backlog, 2025 net sales of 32.7 billion euros (up 15 percent year over year), and a 2030 revenue projection of 44 to 60 billion euros, with EUV tools representing 65 percent of that backlog and 48 percent of 2025 system revenue, as reported by Tom’s Hardware. That same Tom’s Hardware account quotes Fouquet as saying at the time that customers had “shared a notably more positive assessment of the medium-term market situation, primarily based on more robust expectations of the sustainability of AI-related demand,” foreshadowing the guidance upgrade delivered this week.

What We Don’t Know

ASML’s Q1 2026 release does not disclose a quarterly net-bookings figure, a line item the company has historically used to give investors a forward read on future equipment orders. It is therefore difficult to tell from the release alone how much of the raised 36 to 40 billion euro range is backed by commitments taken in Q1 versus long-dated contracts already in the backlog before the quarter began.

The release also does not quantify how much of 2026 revenue is expected to come from High-NA EUV shipments versus the older low-NA EUV platform. ASML has described High-NA as a central growth vector into the second half of the decade, but the number of High-NA systems to be revenue-recognized in 2026 and the customers taking them are not broken out in the Q1 2026 release itself.

Finally, the outlook’s exposure to China is unclear from the Q1 disclosures alone. For context, Tom’s Hardware reported in January that China had represented 33 percent of ASML tool units sold in 2025, down from 41 percent in 2024 under tightening export controls, per its January coverage. How much further that share slips over the course of 2026, and how much of the raised guidance assumes Korean and Taiwanese acceleration absorbs the delta, is not specified in this week’s release.

Analysis

The headline story is straightforward: ASML beat its own Q1 gross-margin guidance, delivered net sales at the midpoint of the range, and used the strength of customer capacity planning to lift the top and bottom of the full-year band. That fits the pattern of an equipment cycle where demand visibility is stretching further out, rather than one where the next quarter’s slope is still in question. The guidance raise to 36 to 40 billion euros also nudges ASML’s 2026 trajectory toward the upper end of the multi-year 44-to-60-billion-euro 2030 envelope the company sketched in January, as covered at the time by Tom’s Hardware.

For readers following The Machine Herald’s semiconductor coverage, this quarter is consistent with earlier reporting on ASML’s push beyond its EUV monopoly and with SEMI’s forecast that global fab equipment spending will reach 133 billion dollars in 2026. ASML’s raised top line is effectively the demand-side proof point for that equipment-spending forecast: the tool maker with the tightest capacity bottleneck is absorbing the upside first, with memory jumping to roughly half of system sales as Samsung and SK Hynix scramble to add high-bandwidth memory capacity for AI accelerators.

The more interesting subplot is what the quarter implies about the shape of the cycle. With installed-base management already running at a 2.488 billion euro quarterly pace and EUV volumes ramping on top, ASML’s revenue mix is tilting toward categories that are less cyclical than classical new-system sales. That matters because it means future quarterly volatility should, in principle, be dampened even as the headline growth rate keeps climbing. The open question, which the Q1 2026 release does not settle, is whether the backlog’s concentration in a handful of very large logic and memory customers still leaves ASML exposed to single-customer capex resets of the kind that whipsawed its 2024 outlook.