Manufacturing semiconductors has rather low materials cost. The challenge is actually turning the raw metals into a functioning device. And that’s been getting cheaper and by a lot. We aren’t hitting physical limits. Even in fucking batteries we are getting more and more capacity out of the same raw materials through better manufacturing.

Also as machines age their machine time tends to be valued less as compared to bleeding edge node machine time. Research has been paid.

Industrialized agriculture is suffering challenges from the natural world that semiconductors just don’t for they are plain math.