The money didn't come to Nvidia immediately. They were in exactly the same spot as ATI when they introduced hardware shaders in GF3 and later pioneered GPGPU on them. Moreover, ATI sometimes progressed in huge leaps (such as Radeon 9800Pro which was miles ahead of anything from Nvidia). ATI and then AMD just ignored general purpose massively parallel computations for a while, and then didn't know what to do with it, while Nvidia had a vision and actually implemented it.