Allow me to take a sledgehammer to this nonsense.
1) Be aware that Intel FAILED miserably at 10nm chips but now are pumped up to make 1.5nm narrow gated chips in Germany. That's hype.
2) What fabless company is going to bring their chip designs to Intel? None. That is akin to giving a competitor your chip designs. It will never happen. TSMC the most advanced in the world does not design and build its own chips. That's why they get the fabless contract business.
3) The big Intel Push in the USA is to build fab plants in Columbus Ohio is not even a right to work state, so the idea of using retooled automative assembly labour is insane. Fab work is labour intensive, the exact opposite of union labour. The costs have already been estimated to increase the cost of chip fab in Columbus by 40%. Translated that will likely mean the costs will double. Germany is even more expensive. That's the fun part about fab. Labour costs will destroy these crazy pipe dreams.
4) A word about Intel. Intel missed the ENTIRE hand held market which sprung the narrowgated processors. So they are not even in the markets. They lost all of them. Meanwhile and I am sure Tom's could clarify but AMD has surpassed Intel processors both in function and price. Thus Intel is losing its own bread and butter market for CPUs. Intel is playing this like Foxconn... looking for Real Estate Concessions and Tax incentives. Foxconn in Wisconsin is the model of this modern high tech real estate scamism.
5) China the 2000 pound silverback in the room. China is moving so fast in everything from memory which is not narrow gated to the SMIC double immersion 7nm chips and soon 5nm chips in the face of a US Government Nancy Kerrigan Kneecapping foreign trade policy. The US Gov has literally stimulated China to become chip self-sufficient. But that is not how China works.
Self-sufficiency will lead to global domination. They will be patient, build internal markets then they will go global at half the price of their global competitors. By blocking tech and chip purchases from China, the US Gov assures the continued decline of the US semiconductor business. Which BTW only accounts for 2.3% of the US GDP. By destroying US export markets the US Gov has cut off Europe and their so-called allies from selling into the largest global buyer of chips. And that will eventually convert China into the largest maker and seller of chips. Why do you think Apple went to the M1? They feared the US embargoing Intel Chips because the CEO of Intel is full of anti-Chinese rhetoric. He sells the fear and pretends to be the solution. He's akin to an Evangelical TV huckster following the Foxconn model. Intel has been losing marketshare for decades. Why would anybody listen to Intel? They missed the entire handheld market. They promise the world and deliver coleslaw.
1) Intel failed miserably at 10nm and nearly sent the company to bankruptcy, offering no competition to TSMC or Samsung. This is correct.
2) What fabless company is going to risk their future by being single sourced to TSMC or Samsung when most of their factories are likely to be bombed by North Korea or China? If you know anything about chip manufacturing, the chip FAB knows almost nothing about the designs they are building.
3) 2 or 3 days ago, Samsung announced that they were in the process of removing all humans from their chip factories, using AI to run the equipment. The few people left will be so highly skilled compensated, unlikely to be interested in the hassle of being part of a labor union. Columbus OH is very close to a number of major engineering universities to draw labor from (OSU, Case Western, Pitt, CMU, Penn State etc.) They are close enough to New York to pull from the talent pool that IBM and Global foundries uses as well. This engineering labor pool is far less expensive than that found in California and Arizona.
4)All signs point to Intel regaining it's manufacturing lead, staying about 1.5 generation in front of TSMC. This will force AMD to use Intel to do it's high end manufacturing if they want to remain a top tier player. TSMC can catch up when Intel is done buying high end machines from AMSL. At this point TSMC has announced that they are delaying their newest processes by at least 1 year. The big players like Apple will use multiple suppliers and leverage them against each other for cost.
5) China is moving to 5nm. Intel is moving to 1.5nm, TSMC is moving to 1.8nm. China may catch up and perhaps dominate in the future, a decade or two from now, but not in the next 5 years.
I have far more confidence in Intel as a chip manufacturer than a system designer.
China's business model of selling below cost to drive the competition our of business then taking over the market won't work here. The will be designing a lot of mid-range to low-end semiconductor parts, particularly those used for automobiles, outside of the navigational computers.
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