Nvidia had (has?) CUDA centers of excellence for more than a decade, they gave GPUs to universities, they've had their own compute related conference for years,

Nvidia had (has?) CUDA centers of excellence for more than a decade, they gave GPUs to universities, they've had their own compute related conference for years, they have a huge set of libraries. During all the time, AMD did essentially nothing. (They weren't financially in the position to do so.) Then they missed the AI boom. Now they are trying, right at the time where the compute specific performance lead that they once had is gone and when their perf/W is terrible (which is not a good thing for datacenters.) There is really no mystery here.