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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
In North America we are on 120V, making a standard 15A outlet only 1500W max, and something like 1200W sustained. To use higher wattage appliances, we have to upgrade our outlets to 20A (2000/1600W) or up our voltage to 240V, but that carries a different set of plugs and outlets as well.
Usually the home service is 200+ amps these days which is 24 KW total across all circuits, though you're right that most individual circuits are only 10-15 amp.
In the US they have a 120V system so it might actually saturate a normal socket over there. My PC room has a 16A fuse and 230V though, so should be plenty :)
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
I hope not though, perhaps I can pick up a H100 in a few years if they get sold on the open market.
Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.
These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.
In North America we are on 120V, making a standard 15A outlet only 1500W max, and something like 1200W sustained. To use higher wattage appliances, we have to upgrade our outlets to 20A (2000/1600W) or up our voltage to 240V, but that carries a different set of plugs and outlets as well.
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
In my experience, AI is easier to read than this was.
> 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.
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
I’m mainly interested in getting some DDR4/5 and RTX5090s on the cheap :).