Discussion
Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt
jmclnx: to me, seems the page is gone. This could be a related item:https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/as-oracle-plans-thou...
mcs5280: The only thing that matters is stonk++
chb: Is it possible that the supply of used GPUs available to home builders will somehow increase as the result of this?
llm_nerd: Data centres are actually prohibited from using consumer level GPUs via license restrictions. The GPUs they use are largely SXM (server connector) and if you did somehow get one most don't even support gaming APIs.
sowbug: What happens to older datacenter GPUs? Do they have a second life somewhere outside of datacenters?I could see Nvidia adding terms of sale requiring disposal rather than resale.
u1hcw9nx: They are build to physically last 5-7 years in 24/7 datacenter use, but they have effective lifetime just 3-4 years, then their value has deprecated and electricity and infrastructure cost dominates. Meta did a benchmark where 9% of the chips failed in every year, 'infant mortality' is much higher in the first 3 months of use.
MisterTea: It's likely the GPU boards are designed for water cooled data center racks and might not fit in a regular PC case. It's also possible the PCB the GPU's are mounted to might not be standard PCIe cards that fit into an ATX case.I bought a used NEC SX Aurora TSUBASA (PCIe x16 board that looks like a GPU board) and realized it has no fans. The server case it is designed to fit into is pressurized by fans forcing air through eight cards on a special 4 + 4 slot motherboard. I have to stack and mount three 40mm fans on the back.
paxys: Plenty of enterprise server hardware (racks, servers, RAM, disks) does have an active secondhand market after 3-5 years of use, but I think GPUs are too specialized for it to be viable. I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.
jdiez17: I've written about this elsewhere but I predict there will be a significant secondary market for repurposing parts of datacenter GPUs (for example, RAM chips) by desoldering them and soldering them onto new PCBs that fit PC/consumer use cases.
