tj,
The move away from the US as a larger manufacturer of semis had to do with a few other factors…not so much labor costs.
Pollution, US corporations did not want the costs of cleaning up.
Chip companies that were smaller than Intel but US based decided to use foundries because of manufacturing scale. Building a fab for a smaller company is out of reach. AMD may huff and puff but gave up on the costs of fabs.
Intel before Gelsinger the current CEO had Swan as CEO. Swan was much more of a bean counter. He brought Intel’s profits up from $9 billion per year to $19 billion in about three years. Swan was not like John Chambers at Cisco constantly negotiating the voyage through the engineering development process. Meaning Intel fell behind on something in particular that is important the “node” technology to make smaller nanometer transistors. Intel and TSM can buy the machinery for making chips from ASML, but the nodes at TSM are more advanced for smaller transistor sizes.
Intel has been small time in the foundry business such as a prior agreement to build Apple chips. But without the more developed nodes tech this rushed more design companies to TSM and Samsung. Also the rise of the iPhone put some of the business into China long with other product needs from China.
Gelsinger has a lot of experience working at the top of Intc directing engineering. He worked with Andy Grove.