that being said, government is a tiny market compared to businesses (cloud providers etc. etc.) so really if they all switch to ibm or so intel still wouldn't be in trouble. it would be a tiny bump in the road.
These sorts of issues were discovered a decade ago when speculative execution first hit the scene, we just never had a practical exploit (in public knowledge anyway) until recently, and even then it really isn't that bad despite all the security apocalypticists shouting that the end was nigh.
Oh sweet summer child.
And it doesn't matter because NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER.
Intel is so much bigger than everybody else in the space in terms of volumes, that even if they vaporized tomorrow, it would take a couple years for everybody else to plug the hole.
Intel has quite a lot of runway to fix things.
Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind.
Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they won't quite cut it, because you really do not want a system that has this big of an vulnerability just sitting around your high-security/high-impact infrastructure. I do know government agencies in my country who - ever since the Meltdown/Spectre information broke - banned the purchase of Intel processors "until further notice".
Intel is in dire straits, and they should be worried.