181–190 of 194 posts
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They could cash out everyone's account from the Scrooge McDuck pile of gold in the vault?
Up to $250k per account yes. The bank would fail but you'd get it over the weekend.
It's been 2 months. Certianly not a worthwhile time horizon to judge this investment over. The apartment I bought 3.5 years ago is worth less than when I purchased. But buying an apartment if you plan to sell after 3.5 years is nuts. I'm confident it'll be worth more than I bough 7 or so years from now. Also, 3.5 years ago, interest rates were significantly lower. I hadn't taken the opportunity to buy when I did, get…
It's been 2 months. Certianly not a worthwhile time horizon to judge this investment over. The apartment I bought 3.5 years ago is worth less than when I purchased. But buying an apartment if you plan to sell after 3.5 years is nuts. I'm confident it'll be worth more than I bough 7 or so years from now. Also, 3.5 years ago, interest rates were significantly lower. I hadn't taken the opportunity to buy when I did, get…
The apartment you bought also actually exists and you live in it (or somebody else does, same point). This isn't really the case with this investment
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Problem is, those Nvidia servers are useless to anyone who needs servers already racked in a datacenter. They're purposely made purely to run LLMs, and anything else would be a waste of time. Nvidia is also fucking over anyone who buy these: datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost, sometimes getting up to half of what they originally paid for the hardware.... this hardware has no resale value. It's l…
> this hardware has no resale value. > It's literally garbage the moment it leaves the factory. Sorry I'm new to this, can you explain how? Why would high-power GPU racks not have good resale value?
* Lowest short term costs favors "just use the Cloud" solutions, that will often have power, HVAC and space constraints that favors new GPUs.
* Lowest long term costs bias the cost analysis to OPEX, where old GPUs gets expensive very fast, as they use more power, HVAC and space for less compute.
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Up to $250k per account yes. The bank would fail but you'd get it over the weekend.
The FDIC currently holds a reserve of 1.28% of deposits. It can handle a single bank run, but not a widespread one.
Afterwards they can use that, charge the other member banks or reopen: https://www.federalreserve.gov/financial-stability/bank-term...
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Problem is, those Nvidia servers are useless to anyone who needs servers already racked in a datacenter. They're purposely made purely to run LLMs, and anything else would be a waste of time. Nvidia is also fucking over anyone who buy these: datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost, sometimes getting up to half of what they originally paid for the hardware.... this hardware has no resale value. It's l…
> this hardware has no resale value. > It's literally garbage the moment it leaves the factory. Sorry I'm new to this, can you explain how? Why would high-power GPU racks not have good resale value?
Each GPU chip is approximately twice the size of the biggest desktop version, and it has two of them, and it roughly twice as dense as anything else you could do using normal enterprise-dense GPU deployments (ie, those rigs that have 4 x16 slots and fit dual-slot GPUs across 8 slots)
However, these are not the same chips, they are siblings: the major change is, depending on the generation, they contain 2x or 4x matrix math ALUs and no texture units.
Seeing as it is a "small" (for enterprise) CPU, and a GPU that is very poor at non-matrix GPU tasks; and since it doesn't have TUs or media controllers (thats the thing that does DP/HDMI and video decoding/encoding) it can't be some weird niche desktop.
Unless you're doing inference at home, this thing is useless. Inference at home, and even small scale enterprise inference, is very very niche. There isn't enough market to give these boards a second chance.
However, totally normal used server parts? Totally useful. Cases, fans, power supplies, motherboards, CPUs, RAM, HBA/RAID, NICs? All useful to end users, either smaller companies doing inexpensive onsite, smaller datacenters maintaining an existing fleet and not needing to upgrade yet, or people building home labs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is, those Nvidia servers are useless to anyone who needs servers already racked in a datacenter. They're purposely made purely to run LLMs, and anything else would be a waste of time. Nvidia is also fucking over anyone who buy these: datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost, sometimes getting up to half of what they originally paid for the hardware.... this hardware has no resale value. It's l…
> datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost Who? Ive worked for few big infra companies with millions to billions of DC assets. After depreciation and then some, say 3-5 years, theyre effectively scrap. Its more cost effective to buy new, denser, racks than continue to MRC on the stranded space and power. The reseller is cheaper/easier effectively paid to scrap the parts as e-waste and recover what the…
Datacenters hire companies to do this on their behalf, as they don't have the internal know-how to do this. Even the big cloud companies do this.
They're on 3-5 year cycles, yet the hardware life has a good 8 years in it. The reseller sifts through what comes out, sees what is still alive, scraps what isn't, and resells the rest.
What you don't understand is this isn't a one way relationship. If you're a major cloud company, your hardware probably already is worthless. Meta (and other companies) use a non-standard case and rack "standard" called Open Compute (OCP)... there is no resale market for these, as normal datacenters use normal racks with normal cases. Meta has to pay a company to dispose of these and lose 100% of their investment.
But lets say we go to someone else that does use standard hardware, and the rest of the industry buys this stuff up (to maintain existing fleets that don't need upgraded yet, not everybody is on some ridiculous 3-5 year churn), the company you partnered with to deal with your e-waste is likely to either give you a much better rate or even pay you for your hardware (if it is in high demand).
These enterprise inference machines have zero resale value. Even the OCP stuff I mentioned above has a small market (theres a few smaller datacenters out there toying with OCP due to it having better density, but aren't willing to buy new to test it out), but there is no market for these inference SBCs.
See my sibling comment to this for more information on why the SBCs are uniquely weird.
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> datacenters depend on used hardware sales to recoup cost Who? Ive worked for few big infra companies with millions to billions of DC assets. After depreciation and then some, say 3-5 years, theyre effectively scrap. Its more cost effective to buy new, denser, racks than continue to MRC on the stranded space and power. The reseller is cheaper/easier effectively paid to scrap the parts as e-waste and recover what the…
You answered your own question. Datacenters hire companies to do this on their behalf, as they don't have the internal know-how to do this. Even the big cloud companies do this. They're on 3-5 year cycles, yet the hardware life has a good 8 years in it. The reseller sifts through what comes out, sees what is still alive, scraps what isn't, and resells the rest. What you don't understand is this isn't a one way relati…
Even with zero resale value thats “fine.” Anytime Ive owned capacity planning it’d be more cost effective to pay someone a multiple of rack MRC to get the hardware out and free up the space and whips. The impediment was almost always free hands and coordination functions that were being spent on new adds rather than replacement.
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You answered your own question. Datacenters hire companies to do this on their behalf, as they don't have the internal know-how to do this. Even the big cloud companies do this. They're on 3-5 year cycles, yet the hardware life has a good 8 years in it. The reseller sifts through what comes out, sees what is still alive, scraps what isn't, and resells the rest. What you don't understand is this isn't a one way relati…
Maybe i read too much in to “depend on used hardware sales.” Ive worked for 2/5 and 3/15 largest us companies doing cloud and infra stuff. Recovered costs from EOL hardware has just never ever mattered. Not even a rounding error on P&L and hardware/dc org has 1000 higher value priorities. Ill admit maybe the offset costs were squirreled away in finance but not visible to the business. Even with zero resale value that…
Also, a lot of the industry runs on incredibly poor margins. The only datacenter space in the world right now printing money is either owned by clouds or owned by the AI bubble (which are sometimes the same companies, or the cloud leasing space to the AI bubble).
Mostly, profits are eaten by power deals (this is why Facebook put their biggest important DCs up where the cheapest power in the US is) or property ownership (buying land, building the DC, paying property taxes, maintaining the building, etc, that shit aint cheap), and then you get to buy hardware and hopefully get customers.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al all cheat their way through every loophole known to man to keep the costs down and the profit high; not a lot of it is from scale, even though they're still trying to chase that to the end, too.
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The apartment you bought also actually exists and you live in it (or somebody else does, same point). This isn't really the case with this investment
I think Oracle would disagree.
During the dot com bubble, telecom companies spent 10s of billions of dollars laying down cables and building out the modern public internet infrastructure that we are still using today. Even if a lot of companies failed, we still greatly benefited from some of the the investments they made.
For this bubble, the only long term investment benefits seems to be the electricity build out and a renewed interest and investment in nuclear.
Most (if not all) of Oracle's investments are mostly in chips and data centers.