Could be a supply thing, cutting out all those components off the chip would reduce its physical size by at least half, which would not only let them get double the chips off a single wafer but also slightly better yields due to the greatly simplified design. So NVidia could position it as "You can get 50 of these now and get started, or you can spend the next 4-6 months trickling in the gaming parts while your competitors get the jump on you"You can't build a mining-cut GPU card without the same VRAM, VRMs and GDDR6 / GDDR6X memory, and the rest of the maze of electrical components on high-end GPUs (so why not buy the real-deal?
I imagine total savings would be under $50.
It's not a good value but I can see how NVidia could strong-arm a market for it.