Nowadays when “Intel” and “shrinking” are uttered in the same breath it is no longer a compliment. After two sets of disastrous quarterly earnings the company’s market value has shrivelled to $84bn, less than the value of its plants and equipment, from over $210bn in January. The artificial-intelligence (AI) boom’s voracious appetite for silicon has propelled other chip firms, but Intel’s shares have seldom been this cheap since the late 1990s. It may be about to be booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, possibly in favour of Nvidia, the champion of AI chips.