I assume NVIDIA and co. already protects themselves in some way, either by the fact of these cards not being very useful after resale, or requiring them to go to the grinder after they expire.
In the late '90s, when CPUs were seeing the advances of GPUs are now seeing, there wasn't much of a market for two/three-year old CPUs. (According to a graph I had Gemini create, the Pentium had 100 MFLOPS and the Pentium 4 had 3000 MFLOPS.) I bought motherboards that supported upgrading, but never bothered, because what's the point of going from 400 MHz to 450 MHz, when the new ones are 600 or 800 MHz?
I don't think nVidia will have any problem there. If anything, hobbyists being able to use 2025 cards would increase their market by discovering new uses.
Cards don't "expire". There are alternate strategies to selling cards, but if they don't sell the cards, then there is no transfer of ownership, and therefore NVIDIA is entering some form of leasing model.
If NVIDIA is leasing, then you can't get use those cards as collateral. You can't also write off depreciation. Part of what we're discussing is that terms of credit are being extended too generously, with depreciation in the mix.
The could require some form of contractual arrangement, perhaps volume discounts for cards, if they agree to destroy them at a fixed time. That's very weird though, and I've never heard of such a thing for datacenter gear.
They may protect themselves on the driver side, but someone could still write OSS.
