I'm suggesting Nvidia is offering great deals on teslas to cloud providers but not offering those same discounts on 1080s; they're doing that because it lends support to their pitch to enterprises that they need Teslas instead of their competitively priced consumer line; if everyone was paying list price, cloud providers would be offering 1080s.
Even with all that, cloud GPU is not cost effective and end users are better off buying their own "consumer grade" stuff.
> Aren't the Tesla class like the P100 mostly super overpriced for deep learning
Yes. Nvidia has real competition from AMD in consumer graphics but no competition in enterprise. Their consumer cards are sold at a competitive price while their enterprise cards are marked way up.
If cloud providers were really smart, they'd release cheaper/just-as-fast instances with consumer cards, but Nvidia probably doesn't want to do that deal; they'd prefer to push teslas as the standard for GPGPU, even if they have to mark them down for cloud providers.
I'm suggesting Nvidia is offering great deals on teslas to cloud providers but not offering those same discounts on 1080s; they're doing that because it lends support to their pitch to enterprises that they need Teslas instead of their competitively priced consumer line; if everyone was paying list price, cloud providers would be offering 1080s.
Even with all that, cloud GPU is not cost effective and end users are better off buying their own "consumer grade" stuff.