There's no single answer here. First, Moore's law is about the density of the least cost process doubling every N months (N changed over time ;). So cost is a k

There's no single answer here. First, Moore's law is about the density of the least cost process doubling every N months (N changed over time ;). So cost is a key part of Moore's law. When you talk about cost, there are fixed NRE paid once per chip design, and then marginal cost per transistor (just including production). To get the full view, it's logical to consider a "fully loaded" cost per transistor, where you also amortize the fixed NRE expense taking into account the expected number of produces chips for a given design. And that's where the increasing NREs bite and make a difference. Even when the marginal production cost per transistor decreases, to benefit from that cost decrease one must have sufficient chip production volume to amortize the NRE and still benefit from a cost decrease. With exploding NREs on more advanced nodes, this requires ever higher volume production to benefit from lower costs on more advanced nodes. At this stage, if you're a medium chip vendor Moore's law is already over --- because with small volume the NRE leads to an increase in total cost per transistor for newer processes. Vendors like Broadcom and NVidia complained publicly about the end of Moore's law, so we're not talking small volume either. For very large volumes, it may still be going on. But that's hard to tell. At some point, the cost may go up even for the biggest (Apple, Intel, Qualcomm) but they may still push forward a bit for improved performance --- meaning higher power efficiency --- as long as there are enough people willing to pay for it. It's no longer Moore's law (where you get more for less money), but it's still moving onto more advanced processes. Still, even assuming enough people are willing to pay more for improved performance (a big assumption IMHO) there are quite formidable challenges ahead.