I remember a time when Opteron had a very large part of the server market. It's about lack of competition, not about how businesses love Intel charging a fortune for their product.

Who's making chips to compete with Intel? AMD, IBM, and nobody else (ARM isn't high-performance yet). IBM's lock-in with POWER is scary to businesses. AMD wasn't competitive for most server needs. That left Intel to charge whatever they wanted (and they did).

With EPYC, there was finally a competitive offering at a great price (not to mention a better track record with meltdown and the constant stream of spectre variants). All the same software runs on the AMD chips too.