No, we are just seeing a push towards Nvidia wanting to make money.

Nothing stops you from giving Nvidia half a million for their latest and greatest AI GPUs, unless you are in China I guess, but China does very well despite the export control.

It is just classic market segmentation, the thing Nvidia and just about every company that can benefit from it has done for decades. Cloud providers are ready to pay a lot of money, consumers wanting local AI have a lower budget, and gamers even lower. But a low budget is greater than zero, and there is still money to be made on these markets. But they also don't want to compete against themselves, so they are going to find ways of crippling enterprise-class workloads on consumer hardware.

It used to be that they crippled high precision arithmetic on consumer hardware, because it was a differentiating factor, but AI doesn't care about high precision, so now, it is something else.

I can't wait until we have real competition against NVIDIA, whether it is from a Chinese chip maker or someone else. Hopefully then these kinds of intentional crippling of hardware/firmware will be avoidable by buying an equivalent product from another firm.

Given the history of prohibition in the past few centuries, it wouldn't surprise me if it is much easier to buy Nvidia products in China than in the US. The price is much higher most likely, but the actual transaction is likely easier.