we're talking about the majority of open source developers (I'm one of them). if researchers don't get access to hardware X, they write their paper using hardware Y (Nvidia). AMD isn't doing fine because most low level research on AI is done purely on CUDA.
I am really sympathetic to the complaints. It would just be incredibly useful to have competition and options further down the food chain. But the argument that this is a core strategic mistake makes no sense to me.
AMD has demonstrably not even acknowledged that they needed to play catch-up for a significant chunk of the last 20 years. The mistake isn't a recent one.
There are plenty of research institutions that can easily spend >$250k on computational resources. Many routinely spend multiples of that volume.
They'll be fine.
Look at China. A couple of years ago people thought people in China weren't doing good AI research, but the thing is, there's good AI research from basically everywhere-- even South America. You can't assume that institutions can spend >$250k on computational resources.
Many can, but many can't.