A fab is not a small business!

Part of the delay is really just commercial. Fabs are optimized for utilization - throughput, not latency. A fab operator will prefer to queue up a load of work with as few gaps as possible, and your shuttle service run has to fit in one of the gaps. If you're NVIDIA and you've already booked the fab, there might not be so much delay. But not zero.

Nice little backgrounder: https://siliconmasters.co/blogs/our-blog/how-photomasks-for-...

Accelerating the process is an incredibly obvious desire for literally everyone in the industry and there are already gobs of money being put into R&D.

The fact of the matter is that we're dealing with physical and chemical processes. It simply takes time for atoms to move across space. In many steps of the semiconductor fab process we are literally building up the chip by single-atom thick layers.

There's very finite limits to how fast you can throw atoms at a substrate. There are finite limits to how much time a photoresist must be exposed. There are finite limits to how fast chemicals can etch the surface. You can only saw a wafer so fast, you can only physically transport dice through space so fast.

These are problems that the entire industry wants to solve. These are problems at the bleeding edge of physics. This is not something a startup is going to solve, purely because you need to already have an entire semiconductor fab to iterate in.