I think the charitable answer is that bleeding edge process development is getting very hard and many exited/stumbled. IBM failed at 14nm too, and Intel which f

I think the charitable answer is that bleeding edge process development is getting very hard and many exited/stumbled. IBM failed at 14nm too, and Intel which famously called itself 2 years in front of the rest of the industry for decades has been stumbling hard since 2015 and still hasn't really replaced their 14nm on the most visible parts of their lineup. As to what failing means, it can be many things, sometimes you just have way too many defects to have the process be commercially viable (if your cost is 10x your competition and you can't fix it, you don't have a process), some bad technical choices because there's been less and less cross industry cooperation (things like the ITRS that gave a rough roadmap hasn't been a thing for a while, last I checked), and introducing new technologies (EUV or new metals) may compound those. Sometimes chips in your new process are more dense (which is good), but perform poorly because of one of the previously mentioned stuff to the point it's hard selling new chips that perform worse than previous gen. In Intel's 10nm case there was a bit of everything and it will be very interesting to know exactly what factored in more (Cobalt is often rumoured, a very overconfident choice for MPP was my initial understanding, I haven't really followed on this). In the case of GloFo, it's perhaps simpler than that : GloFo was part since 2007 of an alliance between them (initially as AMD), IBM and Samsung called the Common Platform [1] that had more or less standardised a process, with a lot of the heavy research done by IBM (I would say, out of spite for Intel) and then used by GloFo and Samsung. 14nm was the first that everyone was on their own, because IBM failed their research. In the end, Samsung managed to get it done, and GloFo either failed or... didn't try really hard ? This is where I'm gonna speculate a tiny bit and be less charitable, I don't think that GloFo was sufficiently funded in terms of process development, despite their parent owner being able to. And it definitely looked like from the outside, at least from my point of view, they were always in dire need of money except for acquisitions, and late with everything (including the process inherited from the alliance). Most of the business decisions done (including buying Chartered and reverse buying IBM's 22nm fabs) seemed to be about pure business and missed the technical understanding of the business and what it required to keep it going. At the end of the day, for them, licensing 14 from Samsung was a great out of that mess. But that didn't happen for 10, and we (at least I) don't really know why. My guess is that GloFo would probably have been happy to keep going on with that arrangement, but I may be completely wrong on that one. At the time I seem to recall that both had some issues filling up their order book (which seems a bit insane today, considering the current shortage) and that may have played into it from Samsung's point of view. [1](https://www.chiphistory.org/546-ibm-microelectronics-common-platform-a-new-business-model https://www.chiphistory.org/546-ibm-microelectronics-common-...)