There are huge costs with increasing performance by 50% per year, and every other year, doubling of mask prices and pancaking of yield levels to less than 50%. Take a look what the prices are for a brand new N4 TSMC wafer from scratch, it's in the billions of dollars. Then 6 months go by where there arent enough chips to feed the demand, scalpers buy the boards and resell for 2x. Same with 2 waves of miners. There's hundred(s) of bucks of cost in boards, memory chips, heating, power chips, over 1000 capacitors, and almost a thousand engineers who need to babysit testing, fault analysis, electron microscopes, and hundreds of supply chain, management, finance, logistics support people, just to make one product. Many work 10 or more hours a day, deal with remote locations in many timezones and barely have energy on a Saturday to go on a hike. 30,000 people, most of which work hard, and get diss from everyone because the latest tech is too expensive.
The place to look for monopolies is the solar industry, where panels are made in China for 50$, come to USA, list for 200$, and are sold for 40,000$ against a home mortgage. And we need tens of millions of those systems. A 5000$ heatpump cost $20,000 installed in 1 day by 2 guys. Why? Cause they can. Same with defense and construction. Some of their margins are as high as 500%. The heatpump also probably cost 1000$ to make, not including engineering.
Those costs affect every one, and way more power consumption and CO2 than GPUs. Only advantage is to reduce power by 50%.
Nvidia has to guess whats going to be relevant next year, and what Elon and Sam are going to invent next. Elon wasn't convinced when we gave him HW2.5. HW3 HW4 and now HW5 at 10x faster underlines how hard it is to figure out how to do next years's AI. Finally, Elon gets it. With ten competitors ready to slash into the biz if Nvidia makes a serious mistake. Never in the history of mankind have so many human endeavors had so much potential to break open in the next few years. Your next drugs, proteins, enzymes, will be designed, vetted, simulated by GPUs. What is that worth? 10 years of life?
Alternatively, why are Epipens 500$ when they can save a life? They won't at that price.