I guess these "commitments" to Itanium were not cheap.
I guess they were willing to pay the price to move to a uP family with significantly higher FP performance and scalability than either their own MIPS family or the alternative 64 bit merchant processor from AMD. They needed a stand-out product, not a 3rd tier OEM's me-too-er, to survive and it looks like they got it, courtesy of Intel.