> Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars

You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well.

Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center.

Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition.

Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.

See also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has been the story of American businesses: "It's too much trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead. No one will notice."

Yep, hyperscalers go on and on about the "fungible" datacenter capacity in their earning calls as a hedge for a sudden decrease in demand. I could see a scenario where there would be an abundance of GPU capacity, but I’m sure we’d find uses for those too. For instance, there are classic data retrieval workloads that can be accelerated using GPUs.