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At a consistent amount of usage, datacenters are at least an order of magnitude more hardware efficient. I'm sure Nvidia and AMD would be fine fighting for B2C if it meant volume would be 10+x.

Now, given they can't satisfy current volume, they are forced to settle for just having crazy margins.

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The problem with B2C is that you need to have leverage of some kind (more demanding applications, planned obsolescence, ...) in order to get people to keep on buying your product. The average consumer may simply consider themselves satisfied with their old product they already own and only replace it when it breaks down. On the contrary, with the cloud you can keep people hooked on getting the latest product whether they need it or not, and get artificial demand from datacentres and such.

I think businesses running datacenters are much less likely to frivolously buy the latest GPUs with no functional incentive than general consumers are...

Future upgrade cycles on phones and laptops, PCs, will be driven by SOCs that embed some type of ASIC that run a specific model. Every 6 months there will be a new, better version to upgrade to, which will require a new device. This is how Apple will be able to reduce cycles from 3 years to 6-12 months.

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