alt Hacker News> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?