I think it is less of a trade and more of a symbiotic capital cycle, if I can call it that?
Nvidia's willingness to pay exorbitant prices for early 2nm wafers subsidizes the R&D and the brutal yield-learning curve for the entire node. But you can't run a sustainable gigafab solely on GPUs...the defect density math is too punishing. You need a high-volume, smaller-die customer (Apple) to come in 18 months later, soak up the remaining 90% of capacity and amortize that depreciation schedule over a decade.
Isn’t the smaller die aspect more valuable early in the node’s maturity, where defects are less punishing?