This is what I've heard on the "street". Building a CUDA-compatible stack for AMD's hardware requires highly-paid SWEs. It's a very niche field, and talent is hard to come by.

But AMD does not want to pay these specialized SWEs the market rate. Their existing SWEs would be up in arms saying, basically, "what are we, chopped liver??", or so the thinking goes.

So AMD is stuck with a shitty software stack which cannot compete with CUDA.

If I were making such decisions, I would just cull the number of existing SWEs down by 50%, and double the pay for remaining ones. And then go out and hire some top talent to build a good software stack.