Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

rrbanffy 8 days ago 29 commentsRead Article on ciphertalk.substack.com

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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

fancyfredbot•6 minutes ago

The relatively slow depreciation of GPU value is an artifact of supply constraints. If you run fp4 inference and could choose freely between Hopper and a Rubin, the performance per watt would make the Hopper unattractive even if you paid zero for the hardware and only for the power.

You can't get the Rubin, or even the Blackwell, so you will pay for the H100 but this won't last if fabs ramp up capacity.

tyfon•about 1 hour ago

I half expect Nvidia to have buyback contacts like Ferrari with the larger customers to prevent a price crash when they all upgrade and to keep them scarce.

I hope not though, perhaps I can pick up a H100 in a few years if they get sold on the open market.

rickypp•38 minutes ago

I worked at an org that had a substantial on-prem GPU datacenter. We transitioned to <Big Cloud Provider> with a substantial negotiated discount rate, with part of the contract being we would sell them all of our hardware and not purchase any more.

someguyiguess•about 1 hour ago

That should be illegal. Sounds like a very fraudulent business tactic.

rcxdude•41 minutes ago

Fraudulent, I wouldn't say so. Anti-consumer or anti-competitive? Sounds like.

2III7•9 minutes ago

Sounds like capitalism at its finest.

echelon•about 1 hour ago

Wouldn't that be crazy - a hobbyist market for H100s?

Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.

rtkwe•36 minutes ago

They're pretty specific to the datacenter use case with no outputs and they need to be cooled externally, principally through the very loud high speed fans used in data centers. I suppose you could strap a fan to one and put it in a normal case or maybe make a dedicated after market cooler (like the water blocks made for water cooling cases).

bayindirh•10 minutes ago

Or you can secure yourself a DLC one and try to feed it with the correct regime (liquid composition, temperature and flow rate). I'd say good luck.

These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.

mschuster91•28 minutes ago

The GPU alone has a TDP of 700W, together with everything else (CPU, RAM, storage, fans) you're looking at 1500W+. Depending on the country, that may be enough to saturate your home's electricity uplink...

holoduke•24 minutes ago

Hell no. 1.5kw is half a socket capacity. A heat pump or many kitchen appliances are using much more. Our car charger uses more as well.

lostnfound8778•38 minutes ago

Liquidate accelerators, liquidate stocks, liquidate ai hype farmers, liquidate datacenters. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of training and high ram will come down. AI will work harder, live a more local life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people

acd•about 1 hour ago

Used GPU hosting for pension funds.

You go to ebay search for a used GPU. You get a price.

Neither is used servers a new thing or used routers. There are established used server companies.

Ä https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

semiquaver•about 1 hour ago

Maybe this article has something useful to say but the painfully LLM-generated prose is too distracting to make it evident.

mrhottakes•38 minutes ago

Did an AI make all the text and kerning so ugly? Why do web sites look like this now?

ijidak•about 1 hour ago

How do you know? I feel that it's just poorly edited.

In my experience, AI is easier to read than this was.

Game_Ender•38 minutes ago

Some sentences feel pretty AI like:

> These are not catastrophic events. They are the steady state.

> There is no GPU futures market, no standardized residual value curve, and no way to lock in a forward rental rate. The premium is is the price of underwriting in the dark.

The headings are also AI like, a lot of essays before usually did not have titled sections but now they do and they all feel like these.

In addition the diagrams themselves look pretty AI generated.

grim_io•22 minutes ago

Nothing, because those "GPU's" are special proprietary hardware and are not what most people are capable of plugging in into anything.

cgyvbunji•5 minutes ago

People are selling adapter boards to plug some data center GPUs into a regular pcie slot.

pier25•11 minutes ago

so when will xAI default on its debt?

latchkey•35 minutes ago

I like Meg a lot a human, but Meg is all doom and gloom. Every single post she makes is about how GPUs fail [0] and now she's onto how financing is a big thing just waiting to crash and "nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"...

Actually, we do, people offer them to me all the time. A used box of MI300x is $257k. "There is no GPU futures market"... actually there are a few of them that people have pitched to me.

This article is a lot of words from someone who isn't actually buying or deploying compute. My point is... take it all with a grain of salt.

[0] https://x.com/meggmcnulty/status/2040851080066859386

cgyvbunji•18 minutes ago

Somehow at any given moment every possible topic to discuss on HN belongs to either the set of "it's amazing and nobody can say anything bad about it" or the set of "this thing sucks and nobody is allowed to say anything positive about it" and I never have ANY idea which one any given topic will be in on any given day.

fragmede•2 minutes ago

latchkey is being restrained. He runs a data center filled with AMD GPUs. He's got a lot more insight to the business of it than the post does.

cgyvbunji•24 minutes ago

If nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth it means nobody is doing anything important with GPUs - time to short everything. Do you believe it?

BenFranklin100•37 minutes ago

Would it make economic sense to strip it down and sell for parts? That’s how it’s done now for older data centers, where the obsolete equipment is sent off to China, stripped down for parts, and sold on the secondary market. I’ve picked up several older but still useful RAID hardware cards off eBay this way.

I’m mainly interested in getting some DDR4/5 and RTX5090s on the cheap :).

aslkalska•33 minutes ago

so you're telling me you can't use 1 or 2% percent of 5 billions dollars to rebuild a team that runs GPU clusters for like a couple of years ?! and the guy that borrowed billions from these banks would want to mess up that relationship for what? I mean he is a stupid narcissist but not to that degree. This whole article makes no sense to me.