Comment by dylan604
19 hours ago
>offset buying a new one every one to three years?
Isn't that precisely how leasing works? Also, don't companies prefer not to own hardware for tax purposes? I've worked for several places where they leased compute equipment with upgrades coming at the end of each lease.
Who wants to buy GPUs that were redlined for three years in a data center? Maybe there's a market for those, but most people already seem wary of lightly used GPUs from other consumers, let alone GPUs that were burning in a crypto farm or AI data center for years.
> Who wants to buy
who cares? that's the beauty of the lease. once it's over, the old and busted gets replaced with new and shiny. what the leasing company does is up to them. it becomes one of those YP not an MP situations with deprecated equipment.
The leasing company cares - the lease terms depend on the answer. That is why I can lease a car for 3 years for the same payment as a 6 year loan (more or less) - the lease company expects someone will want it. If there is no market for it after they will still lease it but the cost goes up
Depends on the price, of course. I'm wary of paying 50% of new for something run hard 3 years. Seems an NVIDIA H100 is going for $20k+ on EBay. I'm not taking that risk.
Depending on the discount, a lot of people.
That works either because someone wants to buy old hardware for the manufacturer/lessor, or because the hardware is EOL in 3 years but it's easier to let the lessor deal with recyling / valuable parts recovery.