New Delhi, Jan. 14 -- Company Outsider is a weekly newsletter by Sundeep Khanna. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your email inbox.

Erstwhile semiconductor giant Intel has shed 23% of its global workforce over the past two years. That's nearly 30,000 people laid off despite receiving billions in government subsidies to boost domestic manufacturing. When CEO Lip-Bu Tan admitted that his company is "not in the top 10 semiconductor companies" by valuation, he was acknowledging what the market already knows: the company that once defined the industry now holds less than 1% of the discrete GPU market, which is the very architecture powering the AI revolution, compared to Nvidia's 92%.

The brutal lesson? Throwing money ...