I don't really understand the bird's-eye view of the product line, but judging by some of the raw physical numbers and configurations Jensen was bragging about, it means that they want to basically play the mainframe game of locking high-end applications into proprietary middleware running on proprietary chassis with proprietary cluster interconnect (hello, Mellanox acquisiton).
The lock-in is more of a bonus for them. The underlying problem is that it's impossible to build a chip big enough, or even a collection of chiplets big enough. Training LLMs requires more silicon than can fit on one PCB, so they need an interconnect that is as fast as possible. With interconnect bandwidth as a critical bottleneck, they're not going to wait around for the industry to standardize on a suitable interconnect when they can build what they need to be ready to ship alongside the chips they need to connect.
It means all the main chips required for a large-scale datacenter. And many of the layers of software on top of it.
Hardware:
* The GPU
* The GPU-GPU Fabric (NVLINK)
* The CPU
* The NIC
* The Network Fabric (infiniband)
* The Switch
And that's not even starting to get into the many layers of the software stack (CUDA, Riva, Megatron, Omniverse) that they're contributing and working to get folks to build on.
This is sort of already a reality. Their vGPU functionality (partitioning a single physical GPU into multiple virtual GPUs) is already separately licensed - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/buy-grid/
And that's once you've bought an expensive Tesla/Quadro GPU too.
Seems logical since it's becoming impractical to cram so many transistors on a single die.