Well, everyone is paying upfront. It's competition for fab time, just in advance. Intel paying means AMD won't be able get the time Intel bought in the future.

Well, everyone is paying upfront. It's competition for fab time, just in advance. Intel paying means AMD won't be able get the time Intel bought in the future. Of course, AMD won't have zero capacity - even Intel doesn't want that - but I doubt AMD paid for all the time they'll ever need. For one thing this is a seller's market, if AMD had more chips people would buy. Also, AMD has a well-publicized chip shortage to the point they contracted with GlobalFoundries again (for the less important chips) about a month ago.