TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects was probably biting off more than they could chew.
FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997: https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...
That press release had an interesting prediction:
> Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second).
They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard scaling in the early-mid 00s.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...