Comment by jopsen

The startup costs are probably astronomically higher for a startup doing custom chips. Even if you're fabless.

There is probably also a lot fewer customers.

There is no shortage of businesses and private people who need a CRUD app to track something. We probably won't run out anytime soon :)

And even then, there is probably also a long list of factories that would like to automate something using robots and software.

How many use cases for custom SOCs are there really? It's a lot cheaper to customize the software, than it is to customize the hardware. Which is kind of the point.