Comment by Animats

8 hours ago

"Secondary market data shows moderately-used 2 to 3 year old GPUs trading at 50% to 70% of new pricing under normal conditions."

That's for good NVidia H100 units.[1] There's a shortage of those. That seems to be the price after removal, cleaning, testing and refurbishing. Raw units removed from a shutdown will not be as valuable.

H100 units are available on eBay, but multiple sellers are using the same picture of a new unit in its original packaging, a bad sign.[2] Some even have pictures with the logos of a competitor.

[1] https://introl.com/blog/secondary-gpu-markets-buying-selling...

[2] https://www.ebay.com/shop/nvidia-h100-gpu?_nkw=nvidia+h100+g...

20 comments

Animats

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walrus01  2 hours ago

re: your last paragraph, there's probably only about 30 to 40 (at max) reputable relatively high volume dealers of used/refurb ex datacenter server equipment dealers on ebay that are located in the US48 states. It would be very risky in my opinion to buy a used GPU or multiples of GPU from some rando who has 14 feedback.

If you search ebay for server equipment like a Dell R840 with 768GB RAM, the same sort of dealers who are selling that and have thousands of feedback (at 98.5% of greater rating) are the ones I would consider much less risk.

lightbendover  7 hours ago

Who is buying these at 70% of new pricing given the sky high likelihood of them being shot? Maybe it's safe to buy from small labs that went under quickly, but I can't imagine a cluster that has been operating near its thermal limits for a couple years fetching that kind of resale.

  • christina97  5 hours ago

    Why would they be shot? Unlike the consumer cards that are basically factory overclocked to look good on benchmarks, the datacenter GPUs are designed to run at full tilt 24/7 and survive for years.

    • Chaosvex  4 hours ago

      Given the decades of consumer and enterprise GPUs often being identical or near identical hardware, it'd be interesting to see if there's any evidence of this actually being true.

  • threetonesun  7 hours ago

    It was true of crypto GPUs too, although mostly people picking them up for gaming. Always seems high to me too but if you can get any guarantee of them not being on fire when they were pulled the bathtub curve keeps you pretty safe, thermal limits are limits for a reason.