But why such an unfair comparison?
Instead of comparing "skilled people with hardware VS skilled people without hardware", why not compare it to "a bunch of world-class ML folks" without any computers to do the work, how could they produce world-class work then?
- For the ML team, you need money. Money to pay them and money to get access to GPUs. You might buy the GPUs and make your own server farm (which also takes time) or you might just burn all that money with AWS and use their GPUs. You can trade off money vs. time.
- For the chip design team, you need money and time. There's no workaround for the time aspect of it. You can't spend more money and get a fab quicker.
Even if you do those things though, it doesn't guarantee success or you'll be able to train something bigger. For that you need knowledge, hard work and expertise, regardless of how much money you have. It's not a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, although many are trying. You can increase the chances of hopefully discovering something novel that helps you build something SOTA, but as current history tells us, it isn't as easy as "ML Team + Money == SOTA model in a few months".
You know what I can guarantee? No matter how much money you throw at it, you will not have a new SOTA fab in a few months.