Could they, though? If all the dozens or so people who could really drive a new big ARM project are at Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and NVidia, they might struggle to assemble a team that could make the needed breakthroughs to differentiate it. They also don't seem to have much interest from a business standpoint, preferring instead to sell $2k+ Xeons all day...and I hope EPYC gives them a real competitor.

Intel manufacured 32-bit ARMv5 chips via a unit originally acquired from DEC in '97. It was sold to Marvell 10 years ago. It's hard to see how any of this would help Intel create competitive ARMv8 server-class chips, but you're right, given their market hold of their x86 chips they clearly have the means to do it. However it would probably take a significant amount of time, and they would have real competition. Sadly, I don't think they'll be investing into server-class 64-bit ARMv8 chips, and that's a mistake. CPUs are a commodity now, and the architecture wars are largely irrelevant with a heavy push towards OSS stacks. It's a race to the bottom, and ARM chips are going to be simpler for the same amount of performance, and that means ultimately cheaper.

I think, based on their past, that's a very optimistic "could".

I see no reason to believe that they could do so, organizationally, even if there was a desire to.