ARM in the datacentre was somewhat of a hot topic for a while before Apple released their laptop CPUs; Amazon launched the first Gravitron to GA in 2018. Ampere launched publicly available ARM server CPUs in 2020, around the same time as Apple. Alibaba Cloud launched their instances based on their own CPU in 2021, as did Oracle (based on Ampere's CPUs).

Given the years of engineering effort involved in getting any of these projects to release, this definitely looks like an industry shift, not something driven by Apple.

Perhaps Intel's thinking here is that competition with ARM will drive innovation and cost-downs in that space, which will bleed 'up' and make their own competition's (mostly ARM) products even more competitive.