> Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good.

What?

I think maybe you are confusing Itanium with something else?

Development on itanium stopped in 2013:

> On 31 January 2013 Intel issued an update to their plans for Kittson: it would have the same LGA1248 socket and 32 nm process as Poulson, thus effectively halting any further development of Itanium processors.[1]

It's true that it shipped until 2021, but I think you had to already have previous orders to get that.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium