Is it an issue of supply? I figure they think non-gamers will be willing and able to pay far more for their hardware than most gamers could ever afford. If they sold comparable products to gamers at a low price the non-gamers would just end up buying them up and even if there was enough supply to satisfy the needs of everyone Nvidia would still be out a fortune.
It'd be better for them to sell low priced gaming cards that would perform poorly for non-gaming purposes and sell extremely high priced specialty cards to the people who want to use them for AI or crypto or whatever other non-gaming uses they come up with.
That'd at least keep the price of video cards low for gamers, avoid supply issues, and allow nvidia to extract massive amounts of profit from companies with no interest in video games. The only downside would be that it makes it harder for anyone who doesn't have deep pockets to get into the AI game.
> If they sold comparable products to gamers at a low price the non-gamers would just end up buying them up and even if there was enough supply to satisfy the needs of everyone Nvidia would still be out a fortune.
That's the point. They're not trying to do gamers a favor, if it was that they'd just make more cards. What they're trying to do is market segmentation, which customers despise and resent.
They could leave the connector on the GPUs and then make more of them. Then everybody has more GPUs and everybody wins except Nvidia. Or to put it the other way, in the status quo everybody loses except Nvidia.
It'd be better for them to sell low priced gaming cards that would perform poorly for non-gaming purposes and sell extremely high priced specialty cards to the people who want to use them for AI or crypto or whatever other non-gaming uses they come up with.
That'd at least keep the price of video cards low for gamers, avoid supply issues, and allow nvidia to extract massive amounts of profit from companies with no interest in video games. The only downside would be that it makes it harder for anyone who doesn't have deep pockets to get into the AI game.