[evoke4908]

Or they can't afford to sell the cards at consumer prices. If they take a loss in the consumer segmet, they can recoup by overcharging the datacenter customers.

That's how this scheme works. The card is most likely not profitable at consumer price points. Without this segmentation, consumer cards would trail many years behind the performance of datacenter cards.

[zeusk]

You can theorize a million scenarios, but clearly no one here will know what really transpired for Nvidia to hobble their consumer chips. I really don't think consumer is loss leading, GPUs for AI is a fairly recent market while Nvidia has existed churning out consumer GPUs since 90s.

But clearly, lack of competition is one thing that supports whatever rent Nvidia seeks.