[CamperBob2]

you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market.

To Amazon's credit, I can imagine Bezos reading your comment, frowning, and muttering, "Why the hell not?"

[seanmcdirmid]

Taiwan? I mean, Motorola and even AMD have sold their FABs out to companies who then provide capacity out to the highest bidder. Now they do trail in process, so 14mm might not be available for a couple of years.

[narrowrail]

I thought Motorola spun out their chip division as Freescale, which just merged with NXP (Philips' chip spin off? Did Motorola retain some portion?

[philippnagel]

I am obviously not Jeff Bezos but I asked myself the same question.

Could such an extreme outsourcing service (not necessarily only fabricating chips) paired with the accessibility of AWS be viable? Does such a company exist?

[CamperBob2]

To some extent, yes, and a few of those companies already exist, with names like Xilinx and Altera. Their FPGA products are available at 22 nm now. But they're not of much use when it comes to selling cheap commodity hardware in volume, of course.