What you say is a bit dismissive of where Intel currently is. They are maybe a year behind TSMC and have been "printing" EUV in high volume since 2023 and shipping it in high volume since 2024.
Their latest node 18A is already in production and should be a lot closer to TSMC's latest and greatest, with the first products shipping early next year.
You need an army of wizards who are willing to do, for the most part, lab-tech work for lab-tech salary while having a graduate degree in relevant field
They don’t make good profits. TSMC has fairly mediocre numbers by the standard of the tech industry. Intel has really bad numbers for the last several decades. AMD was having so much trouble with foundries that they spun it off.
Bean counters/“profesional execs” have been in charge for a long time (as is usually the case when founder CEOs leave/die), middle managers are box checkers that can’t differentiate good employees from bad employees and nobody cares as long as salary&stocks are deposited in their account. All of this gets lost in the cogs of the 100k employee machine.
That is actually a big part of how TSMC got ahead. It's a race. All those years of being able to get PhDs to work midnight-8am (because you're the most prestigious employer in the country, by far) move you to the next node just a bit faster. It adds up.
How much money are those wizards making that Nvidia can't easily afford to both 1. pay them to come fix Intel's problems for a while, and also 2. pay TSMC to rescind their non-competes to enable them to do that?
It turns out when you are manufacturing nvidia's GPUs, Google's TPUs, AMD's CPUs and GPUs, Apple's processors, and the flagship smartphone chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek and Broadcom - and none of them can go elsewhere because your products are so far ahead of the competitors - that's pretty valuable.
Convincing TSMC to sell you their chipmaking trade secrets? You might as well try to convince Apple to sell you their smartphone division.
Get a PhD in some kind of esoteric field like chemical kinetics and then spend a decade learning about oxide surface conditioning under someone who spent their life working on it.
None of this stuff is published (externally) and there are no discussion forums or stack overflows to help you either. You need to get through academia, prove yourself, and then you can start working on a chance to get access to the trade secrets that make it possible.
After all that you will be placed as a researcher on a handful of steps in the multi-thousand step process of making SOTA wafers. And probably not make crazy money, but at this point, you're not in it for the money anyway.
Intel needs expertise that only a few hundred people on Earth have, and most of them are in Taiwan, already working for someone else.
You don't just buy an EUV and start printing, you buy an EUV and give it to a wizard to use as a wand. Intel needs wizards.