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

Researcher: hey I have an idea for a new chip let’s build a machine that can make it.

Engineer: that’ll be 5 million dollars please.

Researcher: oh darn we reached the atomic limits and are crossing into quantum territory and electrons are clouding across atomic barrier. We need a new machine.

Engineer: 200million dollars please.

And so on until they built enough machines to figure out how do build it right.