Nikon — AI supply-chain exposure

Nikon is a Japanese optics and imaging company whose semiconductor arm makes lithography scanners, the machines that project circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. Its structural significance is narrow but real: it is the only supplier other than ASML of ArF immersion scanners, the deep-ultraviolet tools that pattern the mature and mid-range layers of nearly every advanced chip. That makes it a supplier to foundry capacity itself, one rung below the wafers on which everything in AI is built.

The hook is that lithography is the tightest bottleneck in chipmaking, and while ASML owns the leading edge outright, Nikon's continued presence in immersion tools means it is not a pure monopoly at every node. If foundries need to expand mature-node capacity, for power, analog and packaging chips as much as logic, Nikon is one of the few places that tooling can come from. The model weights it as a foundry-capacity supplier, though its share of the frontier is limited.