Fixing Intel Foundry is like trying to stop tripping down a flight of stairs—each misstep compounds the risk, and the only way forward is to take each step carefully, one at a time. The company has been on a long, painful journey back from the brink, and the path to recovery is not about bold leaps, but about steady, methodical progress. For years, Intel’s foundry business was left behind, not because of a lack of ambition, but because of a series of missteps, overconfidence, and a failure to keep pace with the relentless innovation of TSMC. While Intel once had a self-sustaining model—designing and manufacturing its own chips—this advantage eroded as the company struggled to move past 10 nanometers. The delays in bringing 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm processes to market left Intel’s product lineup behind, while AMD, IBM, and others moved on to TSMC’s more advanced nodes. AMD’s strategic decision to skip 10nm and 7nm entirely and go straight to 7nm and 5nm on TSMC was a masterstroke, allowing it to gain significant market share in the server CPU space. Intel’s own journey has been rocky. The company’s Intel 4 and Intel 3 processes—technically 7nm and 5nm equivalents—have been used in I/O dies and some Xeon models, but not in the main compute cores, which have been held back by yield and packaging issues. The 20A process, which was meant to be a breakthrough with EUV lithography, RibbonFET transistors, and PowerVia, was scrapped in favor of focusing on 18A. This was a sign of the company’s growing realization that it can’t skip steps. The 18A process, while promising, is not yet at the yield and cost levels needed to be competitive, and Intel’s own “Clearwater Forest” E-core Xeon 7, which was supposed to be a flagship 18A product, has been delayed to 2026 due to complex packaging. The financial picture, while still fragile, has stopped deteriorating. In Q3, Intel reported $13.65 billion in revenue, a 2.7% year-on-year increase and a 6.2% sequential gain. More importantly, the company posted a $4.27 billion net income, a dramatic turnaround from the nearly $17 billion loss it recorded in the same quarter last year. This improvement is largely due to a $5 billion investment from Nvidia and a $11.1 billion infusion from the U.S. government, which also gave the government a 10% stake in the company. Intel also used the quarter to pay down $4.3 billion in debt, leaving it with $30.94 billion in cash. The Datacenter and AI group (DCAI), which includes server CPUs and networking, saw operating profit surge to $964 million—2.5 times higher than the same quarter last year—thanks to better product mix and improved yields on Intel 3 and Intel 4. This is a positive signal that Intel’s current manufacturing processes are stabilizing. However, Intel Foundry continues to struggle with massive losses. While not as severe as some cloud infrastructure startups, these losses are unsustainable without external support. The company’s future hinges on attracting outside customers for its 18A and especially 14A processes. Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan acknowledged that engagement with a key customer—widely speculated to be Nvidia—has increased significantly. That customer sees value in Intel’s 14A technology and wants to shape its development. The stakes are high. If Intel fails to secure meaningful foundry contracts, it risks becoming a relic of the past—much like GlobalFoundries did after abandoning 10nm and 7nm. But with the U.S. government pushing for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and the geopolitical tensions with China escalating, there may be political pressure to use Intel’s fabs for strategic chips. Ultimately, Intel’s comeback isn’t about flashy announcements or sudden leaps. It’s about fixing the fundamentals—yield, cost, reliability—and proving it can deliver on the next generation of process technology. The company can no longer afford to trip. It must walk the stairs, one at a time, and get it right.