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Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

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Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#261

Post by chollida1 »

tyfon wrote: post #201
chollida1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most North American homes would have 240v and 200Amp service. A 16Amp fuse seems down right tiny:) We have 50 amp service running a hot tub and another 50 amp service line to charge an electric car.

The 16A is for the PC room, the house has a 40A "400V" 3 phase TN connetion :) The quotes are in since the difference between the phases is 230V, but in practice it is almost the same as a 40Ax400V single phase connection.

gotcha. I've never heard of 16amp service, in Canada we have 15 amp.

But its very common to have many 15amp and 240V lines run in a house in Canada.

My kitchen alone has 4 different lines. i don't think your scenario is all that uncommon given that almost all new builds will have the same lines run in their home.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#262

Post by danielmarkbruce »

AYBABTME wrote: post #149

I don't get how this is unique to GPU clusters. As a general rule, underwriters are not qualified to operate and maintain the assets they underwrite loans for. That's why houses, cars, equipment, ... go at auction at a fraction of their value. And why lenders have insurance.

In many cases they could literally do it but just don't have the scale - a small team of folks can finance a lot of real estate development for example. They can't do all the work of the development itself even if capable. It's just too much work.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#263

Post by fc417fc802 »

nl wrote: post #157
girvo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've not had cheap GPUs with this much VRAM before, though. Might be an interesting change, though I also doubt it personally.

As noted in my other comment you can get obsolete GPUs (P100s, BC250s) with lots of RAM on AliExpress now. It hasn't proven revolutionary.

BC250 shares memory with system. 16 GB GPUs have long been available to consumers for a small premium. What's never been readily available before is 40+ GB of HBM.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#264

Post by fc417fc802 »

eru wrote: post #224
fc417fc802 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bathtub curve is also memoryless though, and the back portion can be exponential. Consider two sub-populations of the same hardware. The first is small, evaded QA, and will fail early. Failures follow an exponential fall off. The second is much larger and failures rise exponentially with age. Also consider mixing in "was dropped during shipping" or "was stored improperly".

How is a bathtub curve memoryless?

My mistake, it seems I misunderstood what OP meant by that. Ignore that semantic detail and my position still stands. You've got a mix of subpopulations and many of the failure modes are definitely time dependent in some manner at least in the real world.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#265

Post by fc417fc802 »

dapperdrake wrote: post #235
fc417fc802 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A B200 "only" draws 1 kW. At 16¢ USD / kWh that's $1400 / year. When the hardware costs multiple tens of thousands you might be looking at a yearly electricity bill of ~3% of that. And that's before accounting for the datacenter itself. The difference is that much of the hardware crypto was running on was dirt cheap in comparison. Add to that a lot of crypto was being run on discount gear in cobbled togethe…

Electricity gets converted to heat which has to be removed through the cooling system. Performance per Watt is the key metric for data centers full of GPUs.

That just shows up as a constant factor, accounted for at build out. Consider if each watt dissipated required an additional watt. That's clearly an absurd overestimate yet it would "only" double power costs making the example $2800 / year. Underestimate the B200 at $30k USD and you've got 10.5 years of operation before you achieve parity as a fairly unrealistic worst case estimate. Now consider that at a 9% failure rate the average lifespan is only ~11 years. So electricity (both operation and cooling) is pretty much guaranteed to be less than half your total operating cost no matter how you slice it.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#267

Post by fc417fc802 »

jpc0 wrote: post #221
fc417fc802 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A B200 "only" draws 1 kW. At 16¢ USD / kWh that's $1400 / year. When the hardware costs multiple tens of thousands you might be looking at a yearly electricity bill of ~3% of that. And that's before accounting for the datacenter itself. The difference is that much of the hardware crypto was running on was dirt cheap in comparison. Add to that a lot of crypto was being run on discount gear in cobbled togethe…

Capex != Opex Your are measuring two very different things. And you are only considering electricity bills for the GPU. Higher TDP also means more heat which means more cooling. It's not really easy to make an off hand comment about costs. A 30-40% decreaae in electricity usage and heat output for a fleet of GPUs definitely makes a massive difference to your opex bottom line.

The datacenter will already have been built with an explicit cooling budget. Moving 1 watt of heat requires substantially less than 1 watt to do the work. So you've got a constant multiplier against something like a 9% annual failure rate and an order of magnitude difference in cost.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#268

Post by hinkley »

oersted wrote: post #197
hinkley wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what shovels were worth after the Gold Rush faltered. Blacksmiths probably had all the scrap iron they could ever care for.

Railway tycoons were the real beneficiaries, and the Gold Rush led to broader organic economic development in the West, so railways remained relevant. Not sure what that means for the metaphor, but there you go.

Railways and Madams.

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#269

Post by tracker1 »

jbarberu wrote: post #207
tracker1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, physical limits to lithography are slowing down significantly... so tech will continue to evolve more slowly... it'll never be the jump from 1080-1990 again, for example, even though 1990-2000 was pretty close, 2000-2010 much slower and since 2010 slower still. What's as or more weird is how much hardware is backordered, and how much live hardware is allocated, but waiting on facilities for operation.…

Beating the GPU performance bump from 1080-1990 would be hard indeed...

lol, meant 1980....

Re: Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

#270

Post by m463 »

metadat wrote: post #112
sidewndr46 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't Ferrari the brand that requires any purchaser to be an existing owner? I could see NVIDIA going for something like that.

Invite-only is only for special edition hypercars and halo models. Standard models can be purchased by anyone with the funds and desire.

tesla did that for the last 250 model s cars.

https://electrek.co/2026/04/11/tesla-signature-series-model-...

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