Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI. Hyperscalars refresh hardware and firesale old stock. ~2028 is going to see a lot of high power refurb supply hit the market.
Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?
Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago.
Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things.
Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.