That would take a huge amount of investment in R&D that hasn't been happening... and that R&D could take a long time to produce a cheaper, faster way of fab'ing

That would take a huge amount of investment in R&D that hasn't been happening... and that R&D could take a long time to produce a cheaper, faster way of fab'ing chips. Given the amount of money involved to develop fabs this would be a government-level investment to the tune of tens of $Billions. I say government-level because there aren't a lot of companies capable of that level of investment. Google, Microsoft and Apple come to mind but are they willing to plow tens of $Billions into what would likely be a decade+ of R&D that might not pay off? Perhaps a consortium of of companies could do this but it's hard to get competitors to cooperate. ("Hey, we all need chips so maybe we should cooperate in developing some foundry fabs?")