That's what "fabless" about means. I think using it as an attribute to the chip it's a misapplication of the term. Many companies today don't own chip fabrication plants, so that's kind of the norm, apart from IBM, Samsung and Intel. For instance the new Ampere ARM processor is manufactured by TSMC.
Global Foundries no longer is pushing for 7nm however, leaving IBM in a bad spot. AMD saw the writing on the wall and began to switch their designs to TSMC years ago (so the 2019 release of Zen2 / Ryzen3 will likely proceed on schedule)
Back in the 80s it was the norm for chip design companies who produced their chips in high volumes to own their own fab. As the price and complexity of fabs went up they've mostly switched to outsourcing their fabrication to take advantage of economies of scale (since the fab equipment, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars for cutting-edge nodes, can be shared), hence "fabless".
This is the case for the latest process nodes for the fastest CPUs. But even aside from memory makers, there are microcontroller and analog vendors who still run their own fabs. For example Texas Instruments, NXP, STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices.
There are only 4 companies that make chips anymore, at least at the latest CPU technology.
GloFo (serving IBM and AMD), TSMC (Serving Apple, NVidia), Samsung (serving Qualcomm, Samsung), and Intel (serving themselves).
GloFo ran out of money this year however, and will no longer compete with the high-end. Forcing AMD to make their next generation chip on TSMC.
Memory makers are their own market, and are ignored (ex: Micron).
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Fabless just means you send your chip designs to one of these fabrication labs (TSMC or Samsung... since GloFo is now out). And its TSMC or Samsung who makes the chips for you.
It costs over a billion dollars to build a new fab lab on the latest tech. Maybe $5 billion or more.
Fewer and fewer companies can even attempt to reach 7nm. Its the nature of the beast. The technology is approaching silicon's natural limits, and the amount of research and development needed to advance is getting more and more costly.
I'm not clear what 'fabless' means - is it like 'serverless', whereby it really just means 'not your server'. I.e. 'not your fab'.