Nvidia CEO said they spent $10 Billon dollars on R&D for their new chip. What exactly does an R&D worker do all day? Where does this money go?

Question

How does a chip go from being an academic theory to a $10 billion R&D Project?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Must microchip companies do a big part of their research at another location, like IMEC in Belgium. There, they pay large amounts money to have their wafers processed on the several tools they have there. Or pay even larger amounts of money to use the tools themselves.

This alone costs more money than I expected.

On top of that, there is a large team of people researching and developing. And they all need to get paid.

And the research can take years and years before it gets released.