Yes, I suppose I was imagining the weird transition like AMD did when they split off Global Foundries. Imagine the remaining Intel being a chip designer like AMD. For someone of my age, it seems both incomprehensible and somehow inevitable. Crazy leadership choices seem to be happening so often in recent years.

Honestly, I found it hard to understand why they abandoned RAM and solid state memory fab sectors too. With all the national security spending by DoD, DoE, etc., I would have thought there is room for some US-based business to remain, even if some of the mass consumer stuff has been lost to low margin international competitors.

They wanted to focus resources on the very profitable top end of the market and leave the low-margin commodity business to competitors. If you repeat that cycle enough eventually you just stop competing with anyone because you’ve fired everyone who has the capacity to do that. Then it’s only a matter of time before you get eaten for lunch.

They already spun off Intel vs Intel Foundry into separate companies awhile back

Intel was in ram and solid state for a bit but didnt stick with it. Optane was a huge flop and they use different manufacturing techniques vs CPUs. Plus Micron is one of the biggest dram manufacturers and US based.