They do participate pretty heavily in ML research from what I've seen. To continue your metaphor, they try to invent as many gold digging techniques as possible which exclusively work with their own shovels and buckets.

Yep, see for example ‘Earth 2’.

If you look at deep learning super sampling, they are doing digging and being pretty successful at it.

They've got money for a very BIG experiment tho

I feel like they’re not going to want to go into direct competition with their most valuable customers.

Haven't most of the most valuable customers already started rolling their own Nvidia hardware replacements?

Hedging maybe. But there's no real competition currently.

their most valuable customer is cloud providers and they’re already taking big stakes and picking winners

They would if they could

Doesnt hurt to also sell the gold