Ai companies are making their own chips, Apple unified and other unified ram solutions also a threat

Nvidia is making tons of money by selling GPUs at a very high profit margin. They will do anything to remain dominant

Keep alive the on-prem hardware sales? Not as big part likely but still something good to have. On-prem hardware needs models to be available to be useful. So pushing those could sell more on-prem hardware.

Why would the most rich and evil company on the field want to own a practical monopoly?

Owning the roots, the trunk, the branches and the tip of the leafs.