I might be an useful idiot in this case, but I can't imagine they would be that late to the game. I suppose they get dibs on anything that's a year ahead of its time before manufacturers send it to the unwashed masses.
Devil's advocate; DoD is probably (read: certainly) one of the sample customers for Intel's 18a node. If the rumors around that manufacturing process are anything close to true, the DoD is probably not super satisfied with the yield and probably can't imagine any cutting-edge applications for the chips.
That puts them in an awkward position and somewhat unable to cut corners around Nvidia. It's possible that 18a has improved a lot recently, but it's also possible that the feds are a big-ticket player in the GPGPU arena.
