My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this was a hedge they think they no longer need, and they are missing the forest for the trees on the benefits of cross-pollination and open source ethos to their business.
Meanwhile CUDA supports anything with Nvidia stamped on it before it's even released. They'll even go as far as doing things like adding support for new GPUs/compute families to older CUDA versions (see Hopper/Ada and CUDA 11.8).
You can go out and buy any Nvidia GPU the day of release, take it home, plug it in, and everything just works. This is what people expect.
AMD seems to have no clue that this level of usability is what it will take to actually compete with Nvidia and it's a real shame - their hardware is great.
The hardware may be great, but their software ecosystem is utter crap. As long as they stay the unchallenged leader in hardware, I expect Nvidia will continue to produce crap software.
I would push to switch our products in a heartbeat, if AMD actually gets their act together. If this alternative offers a path to evaluate our current application software stack on an AMD devkit, I would buy one tomorrow.