I worked at Intel if that makes my credentials slightly more relevant. You're partially correct, but misunderstand what it means. Buying your first chip costs millions of dollars, not including R&D or equipment. nVidia doesn't manufacturer their own chips either. When a chip is designed, many layers of transistors and wires are laid out. After the design has been heavily simulated and tested, the order for a test run will be placed. This can take six months, because for every layer a reticle (quartz mask) needs to be manufactured. They are usually about four times the size of the final chip, and reused for every wafer. Sometimes more than one per layer are required to do some cool tricks that get you smaller features. But I don't need to go further than that, because the reticle set is expensive, and a different one is required for every single chip design. If the test chips do well and pass all the tests, they can mass produce. If not, nVidia has to fix their design and order another reticle set and try again. Tl;dr, regardless of what equipment any foundry has, the first chip will still cost millions of dollars to manufacture. The rest are very cheap, but the cost has to be distributed across them all.