A contract manufacturing business only pays for itself when outside customers commit enough production volume to justify the capital already sunk into the fab. That throughput requirement is the constraint Intel's foundry operation has worked against since it began seeking outside customers, and it is why reports of talks with SK Hynix over U.S. memory chip manufacturing sent shares of both companies higher.
A deal, if one materializes, would be a meaningful win for Intel's foundry business. Memory production runs at high volume by nature, and a production partnership with SK Hynix would give Intel's manufacturing arm the sustained customer commitment it has been looking for.