Just saying "it's not" doesn't help much, at least explain what you think it means because every single source you can find on the internet will tell you that it is the money a company has left over and thusly can use on anything they need.
Your business’s retained earnings are something that banks look at before granting a loan. Do you know how retained earnings are calculated?
www.bdc.ca
What you are failing to understand is that reported profit and cash flow are not the same thing. What you are looking for is retained cash flow but that isn't reported for Intel that I know of. Retained earnings is basically just a tally of how well a company has done over their entire lifetime but does not really tell you how well a company is doing today that has existed for decades. Earnings reports are full of all kinds of accounting and it is very easy to report a profit (positive retained earnings) and yet actually spend far more than you brought in for the quarter (free cash flow).
This website has a basic break down:
Numerous other transactions, in addition to credit sales, can increase or decrease cash while having either no effect on profits or having the opposite impact on cash and profitability. Assume a firm buys an office building for $1 million in cash. Suddenly the cash position will taken an enormous hit, a $1 million decline to be exact, yet profits will remain unchanged. Purchasing something for cash has no effect on profit, because the firm trades one form of asset for another. If later on the the company sells the building for $900,000 in cash, it will register a loss of $100,000, yet cash in the balance sheet will go up by a hefty $900,000.
A firm that doesn't have sufficient cash at hand is said to lack liquidity, which is a very dangerous predicament. No matter how many office buildings a company owns or how large its receivables are, these things cannot be used to pay the bills. In fact, profitable firms do sometimes go bankrupt because they simply cannot find the cash to honor their payment obligations on time. Profits are therefore not enough for the long-term viability of a corporation. Management must also handle the firm's cash position very carefully to avoid a liquidity crisis.
So, if you go on a spending spree on infrastructure and physical assets (like Intel), you could easily report small losses or even profits in your earnings and maintain a high retained earnings level but still go completely bankrupt in the end because you've built up a bunch of assets but have no cash to operate and the market value of those assets will be a fraction of what you spent on them. You can see this very easily from Intel's last 2 years if you actually look at their financials (all numbers are dollars):
Intel retained earnings ending:
2021 = 68.265B
2022 = 70.405B
So, in your mind, in 2022 Intel increased ~$2B in net cash. But let's look at how much cash on hand they actually have:
Intel cash on hand ending:
2021 = 29.253B
2022 = 28.338B
Their cash on hand went down by about 1B for the year. Now let's see if they added any debt:
Intel debt ending:
2021 = 33.51B
2022 = 37.684B
Yep, they added ~4B in debt for the year.
So their cash went down and debt went up despite reporting positive earnings for the year (giving them positive retained earnings). How can that be? Well, let's look at their actual reported cash flow for 2022:
Intel free cash flow ending:
2022 = -9.617B
So for 2022, they spent way more than they brought in, reduced their cash position and went further into debt. Yet, if you rely on retained earnings, you would never know this. Now look at Q123 where they had just under -9B in free cash flow and increased their debt ~33% to 50B in just the first three months of the year. Their retained earnings are gone, they've been tied up in assets that will have to actually start producing meaningful revenue sooner than later (meaning the next couple of years) or else you'll start to see that retained earnings evaporate rapidly.