Their fabs are useful to someone at some price point. The microcontroller that runs your dishwasher doesn’t need TSMC N3. Now, the investments Intel has made into their fabs probably can’t turn a profit by selling to other customers, and nobody wants their CPUs.

Note that Intel Core Ultra processors aren’t on Intel’s own nodes, but rather on TSMC N3B. The AMD 9000 series are on TSMC 4nm. Intel is technically on a better node, but you wouldn’t know it from any benchmarks on speed or power usage. AMD has a fundamental engineering advantage in CPU design at this point, and they’re able to overcome a transistor density disadvantage.

Nor does anyone care about getting an x86 license. The companies that want to build top end CPUs on their own are looking at ARM and RISC-V. Someone could have bought Via if they wanted an x86 license. Nvidia could buy it with loose change Jensen found in his couch. Nobody cares.

So that leaves the manufacturing nodes as the major asset anyone would want, but it has to come at a discounted price for the expected discounted revenue. Intel does some other stuff, too, of course, but nothing that can prop the whole company up. Current Intel shareholders will never see a return on investment, but fabs are still useful.