Not just less cards; by making their cards have less ram, they are helping prop up cloud-based inference, which in turn generates revenue for their most expens

Not just less cards; by making their cards have less ram, they are helping prop up cloud-based inference, which in turn generates revenue for their most expensive line. It is the reason you used to be able to get 12GB ram on a 3060, and that now you have to move up 3 increasingly expensive models to get the same, restricted only by drivers and not capability. They made it clear that this was all intentional because they didn’t want consumer hardware in data centers as it costs profits.