Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these numbers, because the prices charged by the Intel fabs for making Intel CPUs are set internally, so they could be manipulated to move all losses on the fabs from the consumer and server product divisions.
Moreover, for the latest Intel fabrication process for which anything is known, i.e. Intel 4, which is used for making the CPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPUs, it is known that the fabrication yields have been much less than desirable, which had two outcomes, both less profit margins when selling Meteor Lake and the inability to produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as they could have sold. Both effects have increased the financial losses suffered by Intel during 2024.
In general, "uncompetitive fab" can mean two things. Either there are things that the fab cannot do at all or the fab has too low fabrication yields at the things that it can do.
The Intel fabs are in the second situation. They can do about the same things that TSMC can do, but at much lower fabrication yields, which means much higher production costs. High production costs means low profits and Intel is a company that has been habituated to have huge profits, so it cannot manage well the case when its profit margins are very thin.