Comment by invaliduser
7 days ago
Even is the AI bubble does not pops, your prediction about those servers being available on ebay in 10 years will likely be true, because some datacenters will simply upgrade their hardware and resell their old ones to third parties.
Would anybody buy the hardware though?
Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.
It's kind of like buying a used GeForce 980Ti in 2025. Would anyone buy them and run them besides out of nostalgia or curiosity? Just the power draw makes them uneconomical to run.
Much more likely every single H100 that exists today becomes e-waste in a few years. If you have need for H100-level compute you'd be able to buy it in the form of new hardware for way less money and consuming way less power.
For example if you actually wanted 980Ti-level compute in a desktop today you can just buy a RTX5050, which is ~50% faster, consumes half the power, and can be had for $250 brand new. Oh, and is well-supported by modern software stacks.
Off topic, but I bought my (still in active use) 980ti literally 9 years ago for that price. I know, I know, inflation and stuff, but I really expected more than 50% bang for my buck after 9 whole years…
> Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.
I think the existence of a pretty large secondary market for enterprise servers and such kind of shows that this won't be the case.
Sure, if you're AWS and what you're selling _is_ raw compute, then couple generation old hardware may not be sufficiently profitable for you anymore... but there are a lot of other places that hardware could be applied to with different requirements or higher margins where it may still be.
Even if they're only running models a generation or two out of date, there are a lot of use cases today, with today's models, that will continue to work fine going forward.
And that's assuming it doesn't get replaced for some other reason that only applies when you're trying to sell compute at scale. A small uptick in the failure rate may make a big dent at OpenAI but not for a company that's only running 8 cards in a rack somewhere and has a few spares on hand. A small increase in energy efficiency might offset the capital outlay to upgrade at OpenAI, but not for the company that's only running 8 cards.
I think there's still plenty of room in the market in places where running inference "at cost" would be profitable that are largely untapped right now because we haven't had a bunch of this hardware hit the market at a lower cost yet.
I have around a thousand broadwell cores in 4 socket systems that I got for ~nothing from these sorts of sources... pretty useful. (I mean, I guess literally nothing since I extracted the storage backplanes and sold them for more than the systems cost me). I try to run tasks in low power costs hours on zen3/4 unless it's gonna take weeks just running on those, and if it will I crank up the rest of the cores.
And 40 P40 GPUs that cost very little, which are a bit slow but with 24gb per gpu they're pretty useful for memory bandwidth bound tasks (and not horribly noncompetitive in terms of watts per TB/s).
Given highly variable time of day power it's also pretty useful to just get 2x the computing power (at low cost) and just run it during the low power cost periods.
So I think datacenter scrap is pretty useful.
It's interesting to think about scenarios where that hardware would get used only part of the time, like say when the sun is shining and/or when dwelling heat is needed. The biggest sticking point would seem to be all of the capex for connecting them to do something useful. It's a shame that PLX switch chips are so expensive.
The 5050 doesn't support 32-bit PsyX. So a bunch of games would be missing a ton of stuff. You'd still need the 980 running with it for older PhyX games because nVidia.
Except their insane electricity demands will still be the same, meaning nobody will buy them. You have plenty of SPARC servers on Ebay.
There is also a community of users known for not making sane financial decisions and keeping older technologies working in their basements.
But we are few, and fewer still who will go for high power consumption devices with esoteric cooling requirements that generate a lot of noise.
This seems likely. Blizzard even sold off old World of Warcraft servers. You can still get them on ebay
Someone's take on AI was that we're collectively investing billions in data centers that will be utterly worthless in 10 years.
Unlike the investments in railways or telephone cables or roads or any other sort of architecture, this investment has a very short lifespan.
Their point was that whatever your take on AI, the present investment in data centres is a ridiculous waste and will always end up as a huge net loss compared to most other investments our societies could spend it on.
Maybe we'll invent AGI and he'll be proven wrong as they'll pay back themselves many times over, but I suspect they'll ultimately be proved right and it'll all end up as land fill.
The servers may well be worthless (or at least worth a lot less), but that's pretty much true for a long time. Not many people want to run on 10 year old servers (although I pay $30/month for a dedicated server that's dual Xeon L5640 or something like that, which is about 15 years old).
The servers will be replaced, the networking equipment will be replaced. The building will still be useful, the fiber that was pulled to internet exchanges/etc will still be useful, the wiring to the electric utility will still be useful (although I've certainly heard stories of datacenters where much of the floor space is unusable, because power density of racks has increased and the power distribution is maxed out)
I have a server in my office that's at from 2009 still far more economical to run than buying any sort of cloud compute. By at least an order of magnitude.
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If it is all a waste and a bubble, I wonder what the long term impact will be of the infrastructure upgrades around these dcs. A lot of new HV wires and substations are being built out. Cities are expanding around clusters of dcs. Are they setting themselves up for a new rust belt?
Or early provisioning for massively expanded electric transit and EV charging infrastructure, perhaps.
There are a lot of examples of former industrial sites (rust belts) that are now redeveloped into data center sites because the infra is already partly there and the environment might be beneficial, politically, environmentally/geographically. For example many old industrial sites relied on water for cooling and transportation. This water can now be used to cool data centers. I think you are onto something though, if you depart from the history of these places and extrapolate into the future.
Maybe the dcs could be turned into some mean cloud gaming servers?
Sure, but what about the collective investment in smartphones, digital cameras, laptops, even cars. Not much modern technology is useful and practical after 10 years, let alone 20. AI is probably moving a little faster than normal, but technology depreciation is not limited to AI.
If a coal powered electric plant it next to the data-center you might be able to get electric cheap enough to keep it going.
Datacenters could go into the business of making personal PC's or workstations using the older NVIDIA cards and sell them.
They probably are right, but a counter argument could be how people thought going to the moon was pointless and insanely expensive, but the technology to put stuff in space and have GPS and comms satellites probably paid that back 100x
Reality is that we don’t know how much of a trope this statement is.
I think we would get all this technology without going to the moon or Space Shuttle program. GPS, for example, was developed for military applications initially.
I don’t mean to invalidate your point (about genuine value arising from innovations originating from the Apollo program), but GPS and comms satellites (and heck, the Internet) are all products of nuclear weapons programs rather than civilian space exploration programs (ditto the Space Shuttle, and I could go on…).
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It's not that going to the Moon was pointless, but stopping after we'd done little more than planted a flag was. Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and the Moon was intended as little more than a stepping stone towards setting up a permanent colony on Mars. Incidentally this is also the technical and ideological foundation of what would become the Space Shuttle and ISS, which were both also supposed to be little more than small scale tools on this mission, as opposed to ends in and of themselves.
Imagine if Columbus verified that the New World existed, planted a flag, came back - and then everything was cancelled. Or similarly for literally any colonization effort ever. That was the one downside of the space race - what we did was completely nonsensical, and made sense only because of the context of it being a 'race' and politicians having no greater vision than beyond the tip of their nose.
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This isn’t my original take but if it results in more power buildout, especially restarting nuclear in the US, that’s an investment that would have staying power.
Utterly? Moores law per power requirement is dead, lower power units can run electric heating for small towns!