Yep, that's true. You have to use the DC SKUs which (IIRC) aren't the same silicon either. Worse: some of the server SKUs are restricted for market segmentation where your ML and hashing performance is bad but video is good (and the other way around).

The silly thing about it is that most of the special engines can now be flashed into an FPGA which is becoming more common in the big clouds so special offload engines aren't that big of a deal when they are missing. So in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too; massive parallel processing and specialised processing in the same server box without resorting to special tricks (as long as it's not suddenly getting blocked in future software updates).

The part of the EULA which is supposed to enforce that is not enforceable in Germany. It is complicated. There might be other ways you can circumvent agreeing to the EULA based on your location.

How do they functionally do that? I googled and found this?: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/rtx-server-gaming/

Honestly asking because I’m kind of out of the nvidia loop at the moment.

Technically: the driver detects if it is run in a virtualization environment, it is at least able to detect KVM and VMware. On the upside, it's relatively easy to bypass the check.

Legally: I assume no cloud provider will assume the legal risk of telling their customers "and here you have to break the EULA of the NVIDIA driver in that way to use the service". In Europe where the legal environment is more focused on interoperability, this might not be as much of a problem, but still it may be too much risk.

They disallow such usage for "GeForce" by proprietary driver's EULA, and they limit open source driver performance (IIRC they require signed binary blob).