If you look at the spaces where ASICs are still successful, one thing that is clearly important that you don't mention is the software kit around the chip(s). Half the team (or more) will be software guys. It's not about fabbing (since these companies are fabless and typically TSMC), it's about software support.
This is a great point; AMD has had chips for quite a while, but only just announced a TensorFlow release that can use them, and it's a binary release, rather than them successfully upstreaming their changes.
