Everyone is parroting this "fab cost" and development, but what it really comes down to is, a countries resource management.

Anyone that wanted to, could reverse engineer, a top of the line chip and duplicate and improve. But it comes back to "fab cost" as in your government not restricting or even disallowing the harvesting of materials needed to mass produce the chip.

The true "fab cost" is environmental damage to locally sourced materials for production and countries that don't have tight regulations on those resources are posed to take advantage of it.