For years Dell would let it "leak" out to the press that they were looking at supporting AMD chips. It would happen every year like clockwork. Then after a month you'd hear that Dell and Intel had come up with a new deal to remain Intel exclusive.
For example, this Ryzen laptop: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-...
It was occurring at a time when AMD was fairly firmly beating Intel on a straight $/performance basis (~K6 era). If Dell had started shipping AMD based systems back then it could have been a big game changer.
The general narrative around the tech press at the time was that Intel knew this and were desperate to keep Dell as Intel exclusive.