I’d say it’s more like they’re failing upwards. It’s certainly good for AMD, but it seems like it happened in spite of their involvement, not because of it:

For reasons unknown to me, AMD decided this year to discontinue funding the effort and not release it as any software product. But the good news was that there was a clause in case of this eventuality: Janik could open-source the work if/when the contract ended.

AMD didn’t want this advertised or released, and even canned this project despite it reaching better performance than the OpenCL alternative. I really don’t get their thought process. It’s surreal. Do they not want to support AI? Do they not like selling GPUs?