> If all a company had to do was get first in line for TSMC's process, Intel would drop all their fabs and just pay that money to TSMC to beat AMD.

What money? They already paid them. Building fabs has a massive upfront cost that you depreciate for decades. The economics have to make sense for them to move to TSMC

That would be a very costly mistake for Intel since then they couldn't cater their existing markets anymore. AMD and Nvidia are already struggling since they must share TSMC's capacity with Apple. Also, it remains to be seen whether the x86 architecture can keep ahead of ARM-based designs and maybe also RISC-V in the far future.

Apple has good designs, consistent long-term plans, and doesn't have to directly compete with Intel over domination in the x86 market. They offer a complete package outside the x86 market. This fits well with who a market leader like TSMC would want as a partner.

"Intel is engaged with TSMC on N3 for its next-generation graphic processors (GPUs) in 2023". https://www.eetimes.com/intel-will-rely-on-tsmc-for-its-rebo...