I do not have any data though, just thinking out loud.
and of course, for national defense, to have homegrown supply chains.
Is this true? And by what measure? I see nothing but incredible growth driven by cloud, mobile, and AI/ML.
sure, there's technological progress and demand, but the market is in a near pathological state. (very short lifecycles, huge investments required even for fabs to keep up, etc. sure, it's unlikely that it will collapse, as demand is very strong, but market participants are very exposed to external factors. there is a huge discontinuity due to the dilemma of staying put and trying to beat the competition on price, or going all-in and building a new fab or at least upgrading one to be able to offer a newer/better process node. which leads to even more consolidation.)
If we have finally reached the final boss of silicon lithography, then the market will figure out whatever nodes make sense (best efficiency, best performance, best value) and presumably we will need ever increasing amounts of them… especially if future solutions just stack tons of dies together etc. it’s fundamentally a pivot from growing through the tech to growing through packaging and putting more silicon into a product… at higher power and cost. But as that market model matures you will very much continue to need more and more capacity to replace the growth that used to come from Moores law.