Can anyone other than Nvidia make big money from chips?

ADAM SMITH would be confused by microelectronics. When the great economist died in 1790, James Watt’s two-cylinder steam engine was considered the height of technological excellence. If he had recognized the prefix “nano”—a fair bet for a precocious classicist who speaks dead languages ​​by age 14—it would have been a derivative of the Greek word for “dwarf,” rather than a reference to the billionths of a meter in which modern semiconductors are measured . The word “billion” had entered the English language by Smith’s time, but the number it represented might seem incomprehensible. Some 200 billion transistors are etched onto a few halfpennies in Nvidia’s latest Blackwell artificial intelligence system (AI) chip? Black magic, even for an enlightened Scottish rationalist.