Nanotechnology.
Own the toll booths.

The best nanotechnology stocks of 2026 don't have "nano" anywhere in their names. Nanoco, a British quantum-dot company, spent the summer trying to delist from the London Stock Exchange after settling its biggest patent fight for nothing. Meanwhile, Onto Innovation, which measures chip structures at the nanoscale, has roughly doubled.

That's because the biggest nanotech industry in the world is chipmaking, and it isn't close. Nanotechnology means engineering things between about 1 and 100 nanometers across, where materials start behaving differently because you're dealing with a countable number of atoms. That describes a modern chip exactly. TSMC's newest 2-nanometer transistors are built from stacked sheets of silicon only a few nanometers thick, and every one of them has to be printed, built up, and measured by machines that work at that scale.

The AI buildout is keeping those machines busy. ASML, the only company that makes the extreme ultraviolet machines used to print the most advanced chips, says 2027 is already close to fully booked.

So the pattern across this whole theme is simple: nano pays when it's a toll on somebody else's volume, and struggles when it's a product looking for a buyer. These nanotechnology stocks are grouped by the toll each company collects: printing the pattern, building it atom by atom, measuring it, and three smaller companies that found tolls outside the chip fab.

The pattern for every advanced chip starts with light, and one supply chain owns the light.

ASML NASDAQ: ASML

ASML is the only company in the world that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. If a chip is made at the leading edge, it went through one.

That's as close to a pure toll booth as public markets offer. ASML raised its 2026 sales guidance to €43–45 billion in July and says next year's EUV output is already close to sold out. Its newest High-NA machines, which print even finer lines, are still early. Intel is the only chipmaker using them in production so far, and TSMC is holding off on cost grounds.

The stock is up about 75% this year. High-NA is the upside that hasn't shown up yet.

Carl Zeiss SMT (Private)

Carl Zeiss SMT makes the optics inside every ASML EUV machine: mirrors polished so precisely that the bumps on them are measured in fractions of a nanometer. It's ASML's only supplier for those optical systems, and its revenue grew 23% last fiscal year to about €5 billion.

You can't buy Zeiss stock. The only public way in is ASML, which owns about a quarter of the Zeiss SMT holding company.

Modern transistors aren't printed flat anymore. They're built up in 3D, layer by layer, then carved.

ASM International EURONEXT: ASM

ASM International is the leader in atomic layer deposition, which builds up a film one layer of atoms at a time. Every time chipmakers shrink the transistor, they need more of it.

Second-quarter revenue topped €1 billion, up 24% at constant currency, and management says demand is accelerating, particularly for 2-nanometer chips. It's already winning orders at 1.4 nanometers, the node after that, including tools that lay down molybdenum for wiring. When there's only room for a few dozen atoms, you need a machine that places them one layer at a time.

Lam Research NASDAQ: LRCX

Lam Research does the other half of 3D chipmaking: it deposits material and then etches it away with nanometer precision, sometimes one atomic layer at a time. Stacked memory and gate-all-around transistors both mean deeper, narrower holes and more layers, and that's Lam's work.

It posted record revenue of $6.7 billion in the June quarter and guided to about $8.1 billion for the September quarter.

At this scale you can't see the defect with your eyes, and an undetected one ruins the wafer.

Onto Innovation NYSE: ONTO

Onto Innovation builds the tools that measure and inspect chip structures as they're made. Its backlog passed $1 billion for the first time last quarter, and revenue grew 35%.

The more interesting move is what it bought. In August it closed a $720 million purchase of 27% of Rigaku, a Japanese maker of X-ray measurement tools. As chips stack into 3D, the critical structures end up buried where light can't reach, and X-rays can see them. Together with the $1.7 billion of convertible bonds it raised in May, that's a big bet that this kind of measurement is about to matter a lot more.

Park Systems KOSDAQ: 140860

Park Systems makes atomic force microscopes, which map a surface by running an ultra-fine tip across it, close enough to feel individual atoms. It's the world's largest maker of them, ahead of Bruker and Oxford Instruments, and grew revenue about 26% a year from 2015 to 2025.

2026 has been a soft patch. First-half revenue fell about 10%, and operating profit roughly halved. The stock is still up more than 40% this year, so the market is looking past the dip to the next round of fab spending.

Lasertec TSE: 6920

Lasertec inspects the masks, the master stencils that EUV machines print from. A single flaw on a mask gets copied onto every chip it prints.

Its mask-blank inspection tools are the industry standard, and it built the first tool that inspects finished EUV masks using EUV light itself. That's a narrow toll, but every leading-edge fab has to pay it.

Three small companies that found their own tolls. They're the nanotechnology stocks least tied to chip spending.

NVE Corp NASDAQ: NVEC

NVE Corp makes spintronic sensors and isolators: chips that use the spin of electrons, not just their charge, to sense magnetic fields and pass signals safely. They end up in medical devices and industrial equipment.

It's tiny and absurdly profitable. Last quarter it turned $11 million of revenue into $6.4 million of net income, and it pays a $1 quarterly dividend. Revenue jumped 81%. A longtime insider, Peter Eames, took over as CEO in August.

Arbutus Biopharma NASDAQ: ABUS

Arbutus Biopharma owns patents on lipid nanoparticles, the tiny fat bubbles that carry mRNA into cells. Every mRNA vaccine needs something like them.

In March, Moderna settled: $950 million up front and up to $1.3 billion more if an appeal goes against Moderna, with the money shared with partner Genevant. Arbutus's own cut was $178 million, and it then spent $230 million buying back 23% of its shares. Suits against Pfizer and BioNTech are still pending in the U.S. and 21 other countries. This is a litigation bet. The patents are the asset, and courts decide what they're worth.

Nanobiotix NASDAQ: NBTX

Nanobiotix makes hafnium oxide nanoparticles that are injected into a tumor so radiation therapy hits it harder. Johnson & Johnson licensed the drug and runs its big Phase 3 trial in head and neck cancer.

In May, J&J changed the trial plan: no interim look, but a smaller final analysis that should come about when the interim would have. The timing depends on patient events, so there's no fixed date. Nanobiotix raised money in May and says its cash lasts into 2029. It's a binary bet on one trial.

The next decade of nanotech belongs more to the builders than the printers.

For thirty years, making chips smaller mostly meant printing finer lines, which is why lithography became the most valuable step in the fab. That's changing. Transistors are now stacks of sheets wrapped in other materials, memory is hundreds of layers tall, and chips are being bonded on top of each other. TSMC has signaled that its next few nodes don't need ASML's newest High-NA machines, mostly for cost reasons.

At the same time, every new generation needs more deposition, more etching and more measurement per wafer. The value in the fab is shifting from the step that draws the pattern to the steps that build and check it, atom by atom.

For nanotechnology stocks, ASML will stay the toll booth nobody can route around. But the fastest-growing tolls in 2027 and beyond are likely to belong to the companies placing and counting the atoms.