Moore’s Law has been with us for decades and that computing has advanced at about the pace Mr. Moore anticipated is why we are now shifting from a world of personal computers to a world of computing intelligence everywhere.

Intel’s first chip, in 1971, had 2,300 transistors, the gates that process the ones and zeros of software. Its newest model for servers has almost 5.6 billion, more than two million times the number of transistors.

That small and dense package, delivered at a modest increase in cost, is how Google can expend on a single Internet search as much computing power as put men on the moon. While traditional corporate computer systems were considered necessary expenses rather than a way to make money, Google and Facebook have made data centers into profit-making factories that need almost constant upgrades.

But building a new chip fabrication facility can easily cost more than $5 billion, limiting it to all but a handful of companies.

Ten years ago, Mr. Smith noted, there were more than a dozen companies both designing and making their own chips. “Now it’s us and Samsung,” the large Korean company, he said. “They do it because they make a lot of memory, for us it’s servers and client products,” or personal computers.

Companies like Altera, Avago and Broadcom have tried to hold down costs by outsourcing their manufacture to specialist chip foundries, primarily in Taiwan. But just drawing up plans for a product with so many tiny parts has substantial costs.