As I know, in ~1990th HBR written article about constantly under-loaded semiconductor fabs and concluded, it is unprofitable to tightly couple them to R&D.

Counter-argument was, that Intel used ties to fabs, to achieve extreme level of scalability, to fill market demand fastest, so marketing won.

What really happen, appeared few new specialized classes of semiconductors - signal, accelerators, high-power (high-current), and low-power (energy effective), and independent fabs made universal pipeline, to fill all market demand, but Intel stuck on desktop CPUs and failed all other classes (as example, Intel was unsuccessful in try to got niche on smartphones SoCs - still have not made cellular modem and nearly failed on GPUs).

To be more exact, Nvidia in reality is most software company from hardware companies, and AMD with their GPU division constantly competes to Nvidia literally head-to-head.

And what was gamechanger - when AMD struck to limits of reliable transistors on one die, they decided to switch to chiplets - they made 2.5D multiple-die design with silicon interimposer, while Intel used their manufacturing superiority to make huge dies with all included.

- Once appeared, with chiplets, AMD could achieve much better performance on weaker but much cheaper technology and won.

So my point - Intel suffered from too tightly couples with fabs, so once they have to adapt their designs and marketing to semiconductors, when AMD successfully avoided this trap. BTW, for this exist much better example - similar problem once killed Atari and Commodore.