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Which is to say that there isn't the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes

I'm disappointed that nobody really bothers to work on the cost reduction side of older nodes. I kind of thought we could easily and cheaply turn out, say, 32nm chips by the million.

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I'm not an expert, but my layman's understanding is that the lower sizes and new production techniques decrease power consumption.

The price of ongoing power consumption probably dwarfs the price of the chip itself in terms of cost of ownership in most cases.

E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day. That's ~$0.20/day where I live, about $6/month or $36/year. Max draw is ~4x that. I've probably paid more in power to run my CPU than I paid for the CPU itself.

Most chips run rather cool, user-facing CPU in laptop/desktop/server are a bit of an exception

E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day

I don't know which chip you're talking about but a 12900K idles at ten watts.

He is talking about an i7 on an older node, since he is comparing the lower production cost of older nodes with their higher usage cost (electricity). I don't know what intel generation would correspond to 32nm, but that was the node discussed.

That would be the venerable 2600K of Sandy Bridge. It idled at five watts.

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