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> So they had all this CUDA stuff, which they must have invested in heavily because AMD showed what happens when you don't. That led to a software ecosystem for ML.

CUDA was already digital gold in 2018. ML had moved to GPUs several years prior, and CUDA was a primary enabler of that transition.

Nvidia had already been through one crypto bust at that point. The long view was that there will be another one and they wanted to keep their more stable markets viable for the future and not get demand slaughtered by mass dumping of used cards on the market when crypto dipped again.

Of course, the AI thing exploded afterwards this time so the demand dip didn't happen.

> Instead it looked like they were trying to maintain gamer goodwill by not increasing consumer card costs during the boom.

They've been selling mid-sized GPUs like the GTX 1080 at 800$ 8 years ago. A 300 mm2 GPU.

They have been rising and rising costs for a long time to milk as many dollars as they could.

People seem to forget even before the crypto craze the company had insane margins in their revenue. They weren't selling 800$ chips because those costed 600 or 500$ to produce...

Even the most expensive 4090 is hardly more than a 400$ chip, memories included to build.

NVIDIA even produced hardware for miners. I don't think they ever cared about discouraging miners or crypto usecases.

This was about controlling proliferation, increasing yield, and preventing inter-product cannibalization.