Nvidia recently made a big change to the licensing agreement of its GeForce software which doesn’t allow users to deploy GeForce GPUs and Titan GPUs in data centers. Certainly, the users aren’t happy about it.
Graphical User Interfaces (GPUs), being a common choice for artificial intelligence researchers, has helped Nvidia to surge 85% in its stock price in 2017.
The customers aren’t happy about the changes to End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) because it doesn’t allow them to deploy the GeForce and Titan based graphic cards in the data centers provided by other service providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Here is the statement from the EULA- “No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.”
The changes are forcing users to go for expensive Tesla GPUs inside data centers, instead of lower-cost processors. The new Tesla V100 costs around $8000 while the Titan V starts at only $3000.
To defend itself, Nvidia said that it made changes to EULA to prevent the potential misuse of its GeForce and Titan GPUs which were not built for demanding, and large-scale enterprise environments.
“NVIDIA addresses the unique mechanical, physical, management, functional, reliability, and availability needs of servers with our Tesla products, which include a three-year warranty covering data center workloads, NVIDIA enterprise support, guaranteed continuity of supply and extended SKU life expectancy for data center components. This has been communicated to the market since the Tesla products were first released,” said Nvidia in statement to CNBC.
Also read: Nvidia is ending driver support for 32-bit operating systems
With this change in EULA, many leading companies using GeForce were affected, but Nvidia looks unmoved, and doesn’t seem to change its policy any sooner.
