It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.

Intel is incredibly important for American sovereignty and that's why they are semi-nationalized. They are a Boeing now.

A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry).

It only runs, what, 90% of PCs, laptops, and servers in the world?

Any company with advanced fabs is important now. We've got shortages of CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc. Many of these shortages will persist till 2030.

A fraction of the entire world's servers are running Xeon and it is definitely important.

And keep in mind that Intel literally still holds the rights to issue x86 licenses.

id argue leading edge fab and packaging capacity is importantish