> and now lets count the number of companies that can put up the capital for tape-out: amd, intel, arm, nvidia, meta, aws, google chips, apple, and lets say plus 50 for fintechs, startups, and other 'smaller' orgs.

And basically anyone who has a job in tech [1] or someone who just pulled their salary out of the ATM has enough money to do a tapeout with the cash in their hand [2] or chinese students for basically free[3]. Of course, for _some_ scopes of tapeout. These are older nodes and you have limited area. But you might not need anything fancy for your design.

The rest of the post, I think has a bunch of misunderstandings or wrong facts, but I don't work in the field, (ish) so I might be as clueless as you and I need to get back to my day job so I won't try countering you just yet.

[1] https://wafer.space/ [2] https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator?tiles=1&pcbs=1 [3] https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/en/