Ackshually, EUV was cracked by Sandia Labs research in the US, with EUV light sources built by Cymer in the US. ASML was the only one allowed to license the tech and integrate it into their steppers after they bough Cymer in 2013. Hence why US has veto rights to whom Dutch based ASML can sell their EUV steppers to, as in not to China, despite ow much ASML shareholders would like that extra Chinese money.
More like it was started. There were a ton of gnarly problems left that took over ten years and billions of € to solve.
Producing a few flashes of EUV and getting a few photons on the target is relatively easy. Producing a lot of EUV for a long time and getting a significant fraction (...like 1%) of the photons on the target is very hard.
https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/making-euv-lab-to-...
There's no such thing in capitalism. Limited supply semi is(was) a bidding war, where China had a blank cheque and was willing to outbid everyone else to secure semi manufacturing supremacy.
Do you think Intel or TSMC could have scored all that ASML supply at that price if China would have been allowed to bid as well? ASML would have been able to score way higher market prices per EUV stepper had China been allowed in the game, and therefore higher profits.
You think ASML shareholders hate higher profits or what? Nvidia sure didn't during the pandemic. You wanted a GPU? Great, it would cost you now 2x-3x the original MSRP because free market capitalism and the laws of supply and demand.