I think this is indeed more of a 2009-2014 thing, and even then it was more "we give you a dozen K40s for your cluster" than "we give you, an individual researc

I think this is indeed more of a 2009-2014 thing, and even then it was more "we give you a dozen K40s for your cluster" than "we give you, an individual researcher, a GPU". The stories I've heard of individual researchers asking for free stuff always ended in "no". I don't see anything unethical about seeding universities (as an organization) with hardware tbh. That's just... grants. Even grants often come in the form of "we fund someone who's doing research on something that's related to us/using our hardware+software".