And maybe a few hundred thousand on press junkets to hype the dream. Millions, tops.
Given that Alpha and MIPS dropped out before there was anything at all concrete, I'd say that hype was the one that mattered.
But I guess it's easy for me to say that in hindsight.
The market did NOT want Itanium, and Intel knew that - but intel believed that they were strong enough to dictate. They weren't, and their internal culture made it hard for them to accept that for a long time.
I actually find it fascinating - Intel had an OO processor (name escapes me now) between the 286 and the 386 that has a story surprisingly similar to the Itanium: Radical departure towards unproven instruction set which, when arrived, delivered too-little-too-late, causing the company to scramble into retrofitting the older cash-cow for the future before someone else manages to eat their lunch.
History does not repeat, but it often rhymes.
There was one CPU architecture designed since, that I'm aware of, that has OO baked in as well as a stack-machine model (the defining features of the software side of the 432, even if the hardware was perfect). The Java CPUs faired about as well as the 432, which is "not well at all". I think "bad architecture" is a better description than "ahead of its time", which is just as true for the Itanium.