Long term I’m on the side that’s super skeptical of Intel foundry succeeding without regular investment from the US gov/tariffs to force domestic products use Intel. IBM, Global Foundries, Texas Instruments dropped out of the cutting edge rac. From Intel’s statements, it doesn’t sound like they can afford cutting edge nodes without major high usage external customers.

My thought is that they may not be able to compete on costs internationally and not even domestically without protectionist policy. It’s a hyper charged version of the problems for American manufacturing because of how expensive and ever changing cutting edge computing chip fabrication changes compared. So not allowing an independent foundry spinoff is concerning for Intel chip design. It doesn’t sound to me like there’s confidence in an independent cutting edge chip foundry in succeeding. The message I’m getting from all this is that Intel foundry lives and dies by having Intel chip designers in a bit of a heavy bind to having to use to some degree Intel fabs no matter what. AMD if they couldn’t spin off Global Foundries