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Posted by rbanffy 7 days ago

Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth(ciphertalk.substack.com)
97 points | 86 commentspage 2
Zigurd 2 hours ago|
Time to dig up the spreadsheet models of what dark fiber is worth.
1-6 2 hours ago||
The GPU cluster's RAM is probably worth more than the flops these days.
latchkey 3 hours ago||
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

cgyvbunji 3 hours ago||
Somehow at any given moment every possible topic to discuss on HN belongs to either the set of "it's amazing and nobody can say anything bad about it" or the set of "this thing sucks and nobody is allowed to say anything positive about it" and I never have ANY idea which one any given topic will be in on any given day.
fragmede 2 hours ago|||
latchkey is being restrained. He runs a data center filled with AMD GPUs. He's got a lot more insight to the business of it than the post does.
cgyvbunji 2 hours ago|||
That's great, their comment should get more attention then.

I was complaining that it's obviously incorrect that nobody knows what used GPUs are worth, not about latchkey.

I have NO idea why anyone is upvoting a post titled "nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth", that is a WILD claim.

latchkey 2 hours ago||
she makes a lot of wild claims for clicks and gets to the front page with them... sigh.
owebmaster 32 minutes ago|||
In 2008, was the opinion of a banker more "insightful" than they opinion of journalists, bloggers and normal people talking about the imminent subprime crash?
CookieCrisp 17 minutes ago||
Cherry picked your example there a bit
fragmede 2 hours ago|||
latchkey is being restrained. He runs a data center filled with AMD GPUs. He's got a lot more insight to the real, lived experience of such a business than the post seems to have.
tharmas 1 hour ago||
Aren't the AI Datacenters for the Digital Control Grid, so govt contracts?
tim-tday 1 hour ago||
I’ll take “people who sell used hardware” for 500 Alex.
grim_io 3 hours ago||
Nothing, because those "GPU's" are special proprietary hardware and are not what most people are capable of plugging in into anything.
cgyvbunji 2 hours ago|
People are selling adapter boards to plug some data center GPUs into a regular pcie slot.
semiquaver 3 hours ago||
Maybe this article has something useful to say but the painfully LLM-generated prose is too distracting to make it evident.
mrhottakes 3 hours ago||
Did an AI make all the text and kerning so ugly? Why do web sites look like this now?
aqfamnzc 2 hours ago||
Isn't this just Substack?
ijidak 3 hours ago||
How do you know? I feel that it's just poorly edited.

In my experience, AI is easier to read than this was.

Game_Ender 3 hours ago||
Some sentences feel pretty AI like:

> These are not catastrophic events. They are the steady state.

> There is no GPU futures market, no standardized residual value curve, and no way to lock in a forward rental rate. The premium is is the price of underwriting in the dark.

The headings are also AI like, a lot of essays before usually did not have titled sections but now they do and they all feel like these.

In addition the diagrams themselves look pretty AI generated.

owebmaster 28 minutes ago||
Soon we will have people asking if these comments are AI-generated.
pier25 3 hours ago||
so when will xAI default on its debt?
wmf 1 hour ago|
Never? They're currently renting out those GPUs at a profit.
owebmaster 27 minutes ago||
Their debt expects a much (much!) bigger margin tho
BenFranklin100 3 hours ago||
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 :).

aslkalska 3 hours ago|
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.
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