This is why OpenAI seem to have burned through 10s of billions of dollars of Azure compute credits in, like, a few years.
Yes CUDA is basically a giant developer platform made by NVIDIA for their cards. It's libraries, tools, languages, tutorials, and other ecosystem stuff like the fact that lots of people use it. Intel and AMD might or might not need their own answer to it. They need at least parts of an answer but CUDA is a lot more than AI, so if that's all you care about, you can skip parts of it.
Now AMD has been trying to develop a CUDA competitor for a long time but it's clear either their heart isn't in it, or they just really struggle to attract skilled dev plaform people. ROCm seems to suck so hard people would rather pay NVIDIA's monopoly pricing than deal with it, which is impressively bad.
Of course the reason NVIDIA is in this position is that they supported all kinds of R&D with their CUDA effort, and it turned out to be AI that hit big. If you just implements the bits of CUDA that seem most useful you'll always be behind.
I don't know anything about machine learning but I think that is the question. Isn't nVidia professional tier like the H100 rare and expensive? I remember someone here on HN started a sharing club where they said they'd pool resources together to buy these things and allow people to basically timeshare or rent them?
Is this like the situation where nVidia is basically writing your code for you by providing abstractions like it does with nVidia hair works and things like that on the gaming side? Would Intel have to basically develop its own answer to CUDA or could it gang up with AMD on this?