it is 20-30% slower than 4090 or H100 in compute, the only improvement is slightly more RAM. This card is not for ML (on purpose) - it is for more enterprisish tasks: some advanced video streaming/rendering, virtualization, etc.
If you're making, say, an ML-based on-premise CCTV system and you need to run several large ResNets at the same time? And you don't want to go rack-mounted, as some sites don't have a data centre? And you want the longer lifecycle and guaranteed spare parts availability of an enterprise product line? This could be the card for you.
Admittedly it's a rip-off, but the Workstation/Quadro line always has been.
Honestly I'm not sure how healthy the workstation market is right now - with the rise of work-from-home and hybrid working, I don't see many people using huge desktops any more. And when Adobe puts a powerful generative AI feature into Photoshop, they don't expect users to upgrade to powerful GPUs - they run it in the cloud, so it works for users with puny GPUs and Adobe can get that sweet sweet recurring revenue.
"Customer may not [...] provide commercial hosting services with the SOFTWARE. [...] The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted."
So if you were e.g. an ad agency artist using a 4090 at your desk to generate images for commercial use - that's fine, because it's not in a datacenter, and the commercial services you're providing with it aren't hosting.
I've never heard of nvidia taking any enforcement action, or defining precisely when an office becomes a datacenter - I suspect this is mostly to ensure the big cloud providers don't offer 4090s.
Reading my comment again, obviously it wrong and I should have been more careful with the wording.
The worst thing that can happen is Nvidia declining any warranty repairs on these cards as they've been used outside of the intended use. But it's definitely not a legal issue.
And EULAs in general are just not enforceable outside of the US.