My friends were at more junior levels so I don't know the full details too. However know this, a leadership class computing purchase by a national lab is a very

My friends were at more junior levels so I don't know the full details too. However know this, a leadership class computing purchase by a national lab is a very complicated thing. Many people have their hands in the decision making pie - all the way up to Secretary of Energy. Secondly, DOE has a strategy (mostly rightly in my opinion) of not putting all its' computation eggs in a single companies' basket. Thus national labs compete between themselves as do companies. Notice the cadence of computing purchases: IBM/Nvidia -> Intel/Intel -> AMD/AMD. Thirdly, Intel had promised that using OneAPI existing GPU optimized simulation codes could be translated to Intel GPUs with minimum effort. The idea had merit, back in 2016-2017. I have a CUDA based simulation code - it's almost a matter of recompiling to Intel, with some minimal effort on my part. That it didn't work out - well hindsight is 20/20