You look at that and want to take a sledgehammer to a golden goose? I don't get these people
They saw there was nascent compute use of GPUs, using programmable shaders. They produced CUDA, made it accessible on every one of their GPUs (not just the high-markup professional products) and they put resources into it year after year after year.
Not just investing in the product, also the support tools (e.g. a full graphical profiler for your kernels) and training materials (e.g. providing free cloud GPU credits for Udacity courses) and libraries and open source contributions.
This is what it looks like when a company has a vision, plans beyond the next quarter, and makes long-term investments.