Price discrimination. Because they aren't getting effective competition from AMD right now they can sell to multiple tiers of customer for different prices. AMD is competitive in crypto, so they exempted crypto from the ban.
But you can already not buy a datacenter's worth of GeForce; they have limitations on the quantity per customer. That seems like a far more effective measure than this clause.
I've spent some time training tensorflow cnns on nvidia 1080gtx.
It works pretty well, but i couldn't reliably train production models for work on it. it's just too flaky. I mentioned this to our 'trustworthy' dell rep who suggested that a good v100 suite would surely solve all the reliability problems, what with it's greatly increased memory bus, or something...
CNN models being "flaky" on GeForce hardware isn't something I've heard of? NVIDIA has made some deliberate decisions to make GeForce cards less attractive for deep learning in terms of performance, but I don't think making them produce incorrect results is in their best interest. What hardware did you test this against?
NVIDIA is planning on standing up its own deep learning datacenters to compete with amazon, GCP, Azure, because instead of selling a commodity, they'd rather sell a service (better margins).
They want to push their expensive enterprise cards (Tesla series) which are exempt from this rule (applies only to "GeForc" cards) and they are probably getting ready to push their own ML service with their own datacenters.