Multiple American fabs--older nodes, but there's still plenty of stuff to be made on 14nm, let alone 90nm. Patents. A sales-pipeline team used to working with external partners instead of doing everything in-house.

Not everything is made in the newest processes. Upgrading existing fabs to newer processes has benefits over building new ones. GF might have useful experience, e.g. with being a contract fab for others, if Intel wants to go that route.

So would this purchase point towards Intel believing they either can make up the process advantage of TSMC, or that they don't need to?

Genuinely curious what you think.

I don't think this has anything to do with next gen process. It points toward Intel needing help starting their foundry service in sales and external tooling.

agree. Intel buy GlobalFoundries gain nothing for high end chip. its probably have to do with Intel IDM 2.0

I don't think it's related to making up the difference or not.

GF won't have much if anything that helps them in that regard, so I think it mostly means that Intel thinks they can use more capacity of their own, even for not top-end process.