That's a loosing play for Intel. The potential market Intel wants to tap with foundry services is way WAY larger than $20 billion, and on the flipside Microsoft

That's a loosing play for Intel. The potential market Intel wants to tap with foundry services is way WAY larger than $20 billion, and on the flipside Microsoft doesn't have a need for $20 billion worth of exclusive fab capacity. That's way too low of a price for Intel to give up the wider market and way too high of a price for Microsoft to get what they otherwise could already get by just contracting Intel or TSMC or anyone else normally. I think the entire point is that the fundamental thesis driving Intel's new strategy (and this is the same thesis behind TSMC, Samsung, etc) is that the cost of developing cutting edge process nodes has reached a point where it is beyond the ability of any single company to afford based on their own product volume. Therefore, if Intel wants to be able to keep up, it needs to expand volume by opening up foundry services to other companies, a-la TSMC. If this thesis is true (and over the past few years it definitely seems to be), then it explains why no individual tech player would want to get into building their own fabs, it also explains why TSMC's model is successful and why Intel is going after that same model now, and it also explains why no foundry would really want to sell exclusivity to any given single player.