>but their software is often seen as holding them back. A successful open-source CUDA port/decomp could devastate the AI pecking order.

This hypothesis is pretty outdated after the past two years. Vulkan and ROCm are pretty good, and some users do buy R9700 PROs and 7900s for local inference. But the improvement didn't result in everyone trading in their 5080s for 9070s or 7900s because, as it turns out, the hardware isn't actually much better with equal software.