Comment by caddemon

I don't think this is the only reason though. (preclinical) Bioscience experiments can be extremely expensive and yet they remain pretty concentrated at universities, for better or worse.

I don't know about the state of funding in protein folding specifically, but knowing about the kind of funding that some other high profile bio labs can get I am skeptical that material resources were the main difference between alpha fold and what the prior academic lit could do, for example.