> and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia. Right. Who then promptly left academia when they needed to start doing R&D at

> and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia. Right. Who then promptly left academia when they needed to start doing R&D at a meaningful and consequential scale. The academic contribution to chip fab R&D today is nearly inconsequential compared to private sector investment, both in raw dollar amounts and especially in terms of impact per dollar spent. This is like saying that academia is responsible for Google because its founders spent a couple years on an NSF grant. Yes -- but then they left to do the real R&D work at scale. Academia plays and important role in training people. But the R&D component is -- with some exceptions -- mostly a matter of "training young people for the real work by messing around on toy problems".