From an investment perspective, I think chip fabs TSMC, Intel, and Samsung will benefit from better AI chip design tools.

If AI made it 100x faster and cheaper to build software, you suddenly have an explosion of software that need to be hosted. So companies like AWS/iOS App Store/cloud companies benefit.

If AI makes designing chips 100x faster and cheaper, you will have an explosion of custom chips for all sorts of applications. These chips still need to be physically made at TSMC, Intel, or Samsung.

Apple says it takes 3-4 years to design each Apple Silicon generation.[0] So the M6 was being designed in 2022-2023 already. Reports are that it costs hundreds of millions to a billion to design a cutting edge chip from scratch to finish.[0]

The cool thing is that we'll have niche ASIC chips for accelerating special applications that previously didn't have big of a market for someone to make a profit on. This is the same thing with software today. It's much easier to build custom software for a small niche and be profitable today than in 2022.

Maybe some day, a kid in his garage can just tell an AI to design a custom chip, send it to TSMC, and get the chip in the mail in a few weeks.

And given that Moore's Law is essentially dead in terms of density scaling, having an AI to automatically optimize the hell out of design and squeeze as much performance as possible out of the transistors could help us have a few more years of nice performance increase.

[0]https://fireflies.ai/blog/johny-srouji-and-john-ternus-inter...

[1]https://www.granitefirm.com/blog/us/2023/04/29/cost-of-chip-...