Google gave away the software platform - Android - to hardware vendors for free, vendors compete making the hardware into cheap, low-margin commodity items, and google makes boatloads of money from ads, tracking and the app store.

nvidia could give away the software platform - CUDA - to hardware vendors for free, making the hardware into cheap, low-margin commodity items. But how would they make boatloads of money when there's nowhere to put ads, tracking or an app store?