You’re talking about M&A (market consolidation) and I am talking about the supply and value chain. Two completely different things.

The supply/value chain is broken up into little chunks with specialists focusing on a narrow activity eg chip design or fabrication or assembly or test etc. There are a few specialists like AD and TI that are still vertically integrated to some extent eg design and fabs, but that’s because they have specialty analog processes for things like opamps , references and so forth. However, a lot of their assembly and test is sub contracted out. For digital devices and companies like ARM, very few still run fabs (semiconductor speak for ‘fabrication plant’) - they leave that to giant fab only companies like TSMC, UMC et al. How this works is the fabs run standard processes and companies design products to be produced using those processes - so by standardising, costs are reduced. A fab process takes 2-3 yrs and a few hundred million $ to develop. Samsung and Intel still have fabs doing predominantly digital, but they have the scale and heft to afford the $1-2 billion every 7 yrs to invest in new plants. There are few others though ( mainly in memory).

I think they mean the manufacturing supply chain, which supply AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel.

e.g. TSMC <- ASML, and the raw materials providers