Isn't that exactly what's happening? From OP:
> The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB has found its way outside China. eBay seller customgpu_official, an upgrade and repair store in Palo Alto, California, sells a similar MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Aero with 22GB for $499. The store is touting the graphics card as a budget alternative for students and startups that want to get their feet wet in AI workloads. The graphics card is allegedly stable in Stable diffusion, large language models (LLMs), and Llama 2. According to the merchant's website, it has sold over 500 units of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB.
The China stuff is just background story I think.
> Nvidia's continuing refusal to put higher amounts of VRAM into its "affordable" cards [...] leaves average consumers who want to run bigger models locally with very few options.
That's market segmentation and product differentiation for you. You want that much VRAM you're doing ML; you want to do ML you can pay us ML prices.
What 'average consumer' wants to 'run bigger models locally' anyway!
If they made the 'affordable' cards with VRAM ranging from say 8GB to 80GB, it would be only gamers buying at the bottom end and only MLers at the top. And they can charge the latter a lot more - so even if they did what you want, you'd end up with Applesque pricing bumps for beefier/more GDDR chips.