Money wasn't really the problem. Apple pulled OpenCL together pro-bono, and worked with Khronos to find willing industry stakeholders that would oppose Nvidia. OpenCL needed hardware standardization though, and nobody wanted to design or implement on a scalable GPGPU architecture like CUDA had. AMD and Apple both bet big on raster efficiency, which turned out to be a terrible play when Nvidia was already putting dedicated ray tracing and tensor hardware into their GPUs. They both bet the farm against each other, and only Nvidia won.

Once Apple fully left Khronos, AMD played the smartest card they had; they architecturally split RDNA and CDNA into separate product lines, so they could optimize them independently. This staunched the bleeding, and gave AMD a datacenter presence that Apple Silicon could only dream of. Still not a scalable architecture, but better than nothing.