Nobody except Apple bought the Intel parts anyway (possibly because they were absolute flaming garbage relative to Qualcomm’s products), which is why we’re in this position in the first place.
I have an iPhone with an Intel modem and can confirm: it is flaming garbage. It's fine in good service areas but in the event of subpar service it basically just craps out entirely. Qualcomm modems seem to handle the same areas just fine.
IIRC that deal was Ericsson fabbing their LTE & 5G basestations on Intel's 10nm process, but Intel's 10nm process can't produce large working chips in volume (and likely never will), which has kneecapped Ericsson as a cellular vendor.
