Thanks for your insights. You talk about testing and design infrastructure. How did Amazon, Tesla and Google get into chip making then? They all make their own chips.

Would you not get really far by licensing IP? Arm does a ton of testing of their designs so that anybody buying their IP can be quite certain that their stuff actually works as advertised.

Or perhaps it is mainly a question of having deep enough pockets and ability to attract skilled people? As far as I know Tesla had hired some really high profile people like Jim Keller to help do their chips.

I am a noob on this. I have never been inside a chip factory or seen how any of their operations work in practice, but curious to learn more about the industry and write about it.