People would no longer buy their product if it wouldn't work on Linux. The Bazillions that Nvidia earns buying shovels in the AI gold rush? All dependent on working Linux drivers because most to all of the big AI shops run Linux clusters.

Don't you think that AI shops would sooner drop Linux than drop Nvidia? One is printing money with no viable replacement, the other is a general-purpose operating system.

I don't think that's right. switching a gpu is as easy as opening the case, replacing the gpu and installing drivers. if you switch OS you will have to find replacements and alternatives for all the software you're using to manage and run those machines, probably retrain people with that new software, migrate stuff, redo all the config in your new software etc.

On top of that I don't think there's a lot of overhead associated with using different gpus models simultaneously, allowing you to incrementally migrate your servers to a new gpu.

If you switch your GPU away from Nvidia, you're also switching away from CUDA which is an extremely big deal.

Aren't you forgetting the "buy a GPU" step? And aren't most OSes either free or significantly cheaper than the sort of GPU AI uses?

Have you read about latest NVidia results? There are no other GPUs. Else they wouldn't have 800% profit growth.

No, people would just patch their kernel to undo this restriction. Some distributions would just do it for everyone.