NVIDIA GeForce Datacenter Ban - January EULA Change

NVIDIA’s recent EULA change

As you might already know, NVIDIA changed their GeForce EULA. This means any drivers that are released after the date of that change (November 30th, 2017 according to this post by Sakura) will be subject to the following clause in section 2.1.3:

No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter
deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

See here for the full text of the new GeForce EULA.

What’s the definition of a “datacenter”

NVIDIA doesn’t provide a definition of “datacenter” in the EULA. That said, we can take a guess as to what their intention is. A small rack of servers in an office server room being used as remote workstations couldn’t reasonably be considered a “datacenter”. However, an entire facility at warehouse scale dedicated to housing servers would almost certainly be considered a “datacenter”.

How does this affect you?

From what I can tell, the EULA changed on November 30th, 2017. Any driver released prior to that date should still be OK to use, however, the new EULA would apply to any driver released after that date.

This isn’t legal advice

While we have spoken with our lawyers about the change, this post isn’t legal advice. If you want to know more, you should have a conversation with your legal counsel.

Does this mean it will be impossible to get drivers for Titan-RTX for windows server 2016\2019?