Can I stick it in the corner of the office? Serious question.

Is your office a data center?

That's the question.

Yes.

Realistically you can also build a server with 8 RTX 3090 and put in in colo in a datacenter. That would technically violate the license, but nobody is going to go after you for that. What Nvidia wants to prevent is hosting providers/IaaS renting out servers with consumer GPUs.

Haha so as long as you append some light proof of work to every task, you get them on a technicality?

Honestly though, who the fuck are they to tell you what to do with the hardware that you bought? Like telling people they are not allowed to drive their car on gravel roads or not being allowed to drink wine from a beer glass without paying for a special overpriced one or something.

Usually it involves warranty issues. Although in this case, it seems especially odd since this clause was added to effectively force data centers to buy their more expensive hardware. It goes back a while (~2018), so you'd think they would have revised this policy:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

It mostly just means that don't expect them to provide you any support for that use case. It isn't all that uncommon for smaller studios to just cluster together a couple of computers with 3-4 high end gaming GPUs each as a rendering farm for instance.

Why the #-@-#&# do they allow blockchains??? I guess they probably figured out it's good for the bottom line and all, but it's pretty obnoxious to allow blockchains, which seems to have been the cause of the shortages, while banning everything else.

After ETH switched from PoW to PoS, it had the effect of decimating the entire GPU mining market. Very few GPUs are being used for crypto any more.

If there are shortages, these days it is because of ML/AI/Gaming.

In fact, there are shortages... did you know it is nearly impossible to get data center space of any size for any decent price? AI has eaten it all up.

On top of it, AI doesn't care about the environment. There is so much money being dumped into it right now, that people are pulling power from wherever they can get it and at any cost.

On the bright side, at least crypto tried to go the cheapest routes... which happened to be mostly green based power.

So yea... be mad at AI now.