I mean it makes sense if they just choose not to sell the cards they don’t want in datacenters to people who will use them that way.

What weirds me out is that you could have purchased the card, eventually decide to use it in a way that goes against their EULA, and they could just decide to take away your access to the software required to use the hardware.

I guess it’s more or less the same feeling as certain people have about Windows licensing or buying games on certain platforms. You’re buying a license to use whatever it is rather than actually buying the thing, and this kind of feels like an extension of that to hardware.

It doesn't stop the 'raid the local Microcenter' problem though -- which I was guilty of at my last job. As it turns out people realized that at scale it was actually cheaper to just buy out big-box stores and play the silicon lottery with GeForce cards than buy Nvidia's high-end cards.

Now look, Nvidia wants to make more money, let's not pretend that there's really any other primary motivation here. And segmenting the people who make money with their cards and the people who use them for entertainment is a pretty solid way to do that. However, the secondary reason for this is that on the consumer side people complained that stores were constantly sold out of new cards from large businesses buying them all up. Some stores implemented rationing schemes but the 'final solution' it seems is to just stick a line in the license that says you can't stick these cards in your DC.

OTOH, Intel found ways to segment without attempting insane things like "oh but I don't allow you to put a Core i5 in a datacenter".

A kind of clause which might very well be void in tons of jurisdictions, by the way.

Because software you license, hardware you buy.