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I wondered how it is possible that they can restrict the use of hardware after it is bought. After reading the article I learned that they key is the license to the drivers.

So I guess in theory it would be possible for AWS to develop their own (or enhance open source) drivers. On the other hand they would spoil the business relationship with Nvidia and have to do without any discounts.

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The problem is that there's already open-source nvidia driver -- https://nouveau.freedesktop.org -- but it's so feature incomplete that it's good only for hobby. You can't run CUDA on it, you can't run any recent games on it, you can run TensorFlow on it, you can't run PyTorch on it, etc etc -- it is essentially useless and has been so for many years.

And often you have to disable it, because the system hangs if it's turned on.

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