This is a work of fiction, channeling Charlie Stross and his Laundry Files series. I made it after we started hearing rumors that Intel has cancelled their next generation process too... BISON ZENITH confirmed

Connect the dots:

Internal Intel memos from as early as 2008 confirm a skunkworks plan to develop metamaterials—a "superlens"—rather than pursue techniques like EUV for post-14nm process nodes. The "superlens" was supposed to be able to focus normal UV light onto sub-wavelength regions, impossible for traditional optics and even according to the predictions of quantum physics.

FOIA requests show hundreds of chartered flights yearly from the NSA's Utah Data Center to the Chandler Municipal Airport, just 3 miles from Intel's Fab 42 just outside Phoenix Arizona, starting in 2012 and continuing until April 2018.

The uncanny resemblance of Chandler's Cottonwood and Sun Lakes golf course developments to class D and F warding glyphs; and the unusually strict anti-occult and anti-religious symbol rules in the HOA covenants. (This would have been for the safety of the subdivision's occupants; at such short range even as innocuous a religious symbol as a "marshmallow peep" would burst into flame within the area of the glyph itself)

Results from ABJAD SURVEY show that in near-habitable parallels, the most frequent parameter variation that prohibits the survival of an earth biosphere is in the parameter 'c', the speed of light. Variations as small as 3% prevent pollinators from locating flowers, but even variations of 27% are short-term survivable by adult humans, given proper personal protection.

The unexplained hour of localized daytime darkness in Chandler AZ on 4/18/18; initially reported as a "terror attack", there were no direct casualties (just road accidents). The official NTSB report states that the crashed Cessna 680 on arrival from Salt Lake City had no one on board.


Our conjecture:

When the Black Chamber shows up with credentials thst say "NSA" and promises you access to an out of this world process for creating integrated circuits, you need to take that phrase literally. But of course in the first two decades of the century, there was no awareness of this in the general public. And if you were on the inside, you would authorize such activities as a matter of course.

The "superlens" technology is better understood as a pair of back to back gates, leading to a region of the multiverse with the a 'c' value about 70% below nominal. This would allow a UV process that supported the 17nm node in our physics to scale down to the 5nm mode, allowing Intel to maintain its worldwide process advantage for a decade or more.

Black Chamber produced the superlenses at the Utah Data Center and hand delivered them to Intel staff who were unaware of just what they were handling. The gates were presumably designed with a half life of around a week, based on the frequency of flights. This plan went fine, until something happened on the 4/18 flight. Did containment of the gates fail during the flight, or was it a part of a defection plan or a convert operation by one of our adversaries?

In any case, Intel never did ship a post-14nm part from the Chandler fabrication facility.

Editor's note: Strictly speaking, 'c' is not a parameter, since it is not one of the fundamental dimensionless constants. Technically, I should say 'ɑ'. But since the effect we're interested in pertains to the speed of light, it is clearer to express things in these terms. Remember, in atomic units 'ɑ = 1/c'.