Not so much because they necessarily think it will make them a zillion bucks or be a competitive use of their allocation of bleeding-edge TSMC vs. datacenter parts; but as a defensive move.

For ‘edge’ stuff that is small enough that you don’t just mean ‘short depth server that doesn’t require air conditioning and has a locking case’; the seemingly obvious, though likely inferior for ‘AI’ specifically, option is either basically any generic ARM SoC, or a smartphone-oriented SoC(if you need the cell modem anyway).

The latter, in particular, have had some pretty punchy DSP/ISP to support cameras for some years now; and they’ve been rapidly re-tooling that into ‘NPU’/’AI’ functions. they aren’t necessarily better than what Nvidia has; but unless they are abjectly unsuitable for purpose they are likely to spawn a bunch of ‘edge AI’ applications that don’t rely on CUDA or other Nvidia tools; and the history of computing is full of small, cheap, mediocre solutions that gradually moved upmarket and nibbled away at the far classier and more expensive competition.

I assume that Nvidia is comfortably ahead of say Mediatek or Qualcomm; but they can’t be entirely happy about ‘edge’ stuff getting developed for Helio or Dimensity SoCs just because those are about the cheapest way to get some ARM cores and a MIPI CSI camera onto a cell network potentially migrating upmarket if Mediatek feels like copy/pasting their NPU into a larger PCIe card; or Qualcomm feels like emphasizing that targeting their NPU gives you a shared target from relatively cheap cellular SoCs up through their entries into the PC space.