Hacker News

All indications are there will be a lot of repossessed GPUs appearing on the market before too long. Likely to be messy for a while but will open up a lot of possibilities when it’s easy to get your hands on some secondhand GPUs.

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.

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.

One data point: 512GB Mac Studios are selling on ebay for double what they were selling for new at the beginning of the year.

Time to dig up the spreadsheet models of what dark fiber is worth.

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

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.

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

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

The GPU cluster's RAM is probably worth more than the flops these days.

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

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

GPU clusters have, largely, no actual value.

If anything, you might have to pay to have them disposed of, they don't really have any meaningful used eBay market outside of the randos that want to do high end extreme local inference in their basement.

Also, as for RAMmageddon, the inference SBCs that all of the AI bros bought don't have DIMMs, they're not even the right chip: its all GDDR and LPDDR. The only DDR DIMMs being consumed are for regular non-inference machines that help run the business and service infrastructure behind the scenes.

so when will xAI default on its debt?

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 :).

Given the price for a rack of bc-250 after the crypto hype cycle, the expected value of the hardware will be around 5% to 10% of the original retail price.

Without other market influences, that is a >90% expected discount when the over-provisioned market must inevitably self-correct.

If the Market follows what Samsung/SK Hynix did to the South Korean exchange this week, than the "AI" bubble will hit harder than the dot com crash.

I like the Shrek Movie correlation theory, as they always happen just before Debt-backed investors get hit hard... And the new film is due out in 2027. =3

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.

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?