> They do this using their monopsony power (they will buy all the fab capacity at TSMC and/or Samsung, and well before competition is aiming to do so either).
It's not just buying power - Apple pays billions of dollars yearly to TSMC for R&D work itself. These nodes literally would not exist on the timelines they do without Apple writing big fat checks for blue-sky R&D, unless there's another big customer who would be willing to step up and play sugar-daddy.
Most of the other potential candidates either own their own fabs (intel, samsung, TI, etc), are working on stuff that doesn't really need cutting-edge nodes (TI, Asmedia, Renesas, etc), or simply lack the scale of production to ever make it work (NVIDIA, AMD, etc). Apple is unique in that they hit all three: fabless, cutting-edge, massive-scale, plus they're willing to pay a premium to not just secure access but to actually fund development of the nodes from scratch.
It would be a very interesting alt-history if Apple had not done this - TSMC 7nm would probably have been on timelines similar to Intel 10nm, AMD wouldn't have access to a node with absurd cache density and vastly superior efficiency compared to the alternatives (Intel 14nm was still a better-than-market node, compared to the GF/Samsung alternatives in 2019!), etc. I think AMD almost certainly goes under in this timeline, without Zen2/Zen3/Zen3D having huge caches and Rome making a huge splash in the server market, and without TSMC styling on GF so badly that GF leaves the market and lets AMD out of the WSA, Zen2 probably would have been on a failing GF 7nm node with much lower cache density, and would just have been far less impressive.
AMD of course did a ton of work too, they came up with the interconnect and the topology, but it still rather directly owes its continued existence to Apple and those big fat R&D check. You can't have AMD building efficient, scalable cache monsters (CPU and GPU) without TSMC being 2 nodes ahead of market on cache density and 1 node ahead of the market on efficiency. And they wouldn't have been there without Apple writing a blank check for node R&D.
It's not just buying power - Apple pays billions of dollars yearly to TSMC for R&D work itself. These nodes literally would not exist on the timelines they do without Apple writing big fat checks for blue-sky R&D, unless there's another big customer who would be willing to step up and play sugar-daddy.
Most of the other potential candidates either own their own fabs (intel, samsung, TI, etc), are working on stuff that doesn't really need cutting-edge nodes (TI, Asmedia, Renesas, etc), or simply lack the scale of production to ever make it work (NVIDIA, AMD, etc). Apple is unique in that they hit all three: fabless, cutting-edge, massive-scale, plus they're willing to pay a premium to not just secure access but to actually fund development of the nodes from scratch.
It would be a very interesting alt-history if Apple had not done this - TSMC 7nm would probably have been on timelines similar to Intel 10nm, AMD wouldn't have access to a node with absurd cache density and vastly superior efficiency compared to the alternatives (Intel 14nm was still a better-than-market node, compared to the GF/Samsung alternatives in 2019!), etc. I think AMD almost certainly goes under in this timeline, without Zen2/Zen3/Zen3D having huge caches and Rome making a huge splash in the server market, and without TSMC styling on GF so badly that GF leaves the market and lets AMD out of the WSA, Zen2 probably would have been on a failing GF 7nm node with much lower cache density, and would just have been far less impressive.
AMD of course did a ton of work too, they came up with the interconnect and the topology, but it still rather directly owes its continued existence to Apple and those big fat R&D check. You can't have AMD building efficient, scalable cache monsters (CPU and GPU) without TSMC being 2 nodes ahead of market on cache density and 1 node ahead of the market on efficiency. And they wouldn't have been there without Apple writing a blank check for node R&D.