Nördnytt! 🤓Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
- Animats - 679 sekunder sedan"Secondary market data shows moderately-used 2 to 3 year old GPUs trading at 50% to 70% of new pricing under normal conditions."
That's for good NVidia H100 units.[1] There's a shortage of those. That seems to be the price after removal, cleaning, testing and refurbishing. Raw units removed from a shutdown will not be as valuable.
H100 units are available on eBay, but multiple sellers are using the same picture of a new unit in its original packaging, a bad sign.[2] Some even have pictures with the logos of a competitor.
[1] https://introl.com/blog/secondary-gpu-markets-buying-selling...
[2] https://www.ebay.com/shop/nvidia-h100-gpu?_nkw=nvidia+h100+g...
- tyfon - 8558 sekunder sedanI half expect Nvidia to have buyback contacts like Ferrari with the larger customers to prevent a price crash when they all upgrade and to keep them scarce.
I hope not though, perhaps I can pick up a H100 in a few years if they get sold on the open market.
- ponkpanda - 883 sekunder sedanVery difficult to sense check that substack post without access to the TLB credit agreement.
There are likely management service agreements from xAI proper -> SPV to cover precisely what the author talks about. Clearly, xAI could play games but without seeing the docs (which are not public), it's very difficult.
This article's basic point is right though. On the other hand, the LTV of this deal was approx 50% debt-financed (not too high; very much depends on the "V"). At 12.5%, it's not as if its being priced as a high quality asset.
Overall, substack post was too bearish. The wider point is that there's a lot of froth tied to what has now become systemically opaque - namely the circular deal flow that every hyperscaler, nvidia, neoclouds and friends are now engaged in. When the proverbial hits the fan, that stuff will be difficult to price and find few willing buyers with the competence to underwrite.
The systemic issues are the bigger concern than one specific deal imo.
- fancyfredbot - 5231 sekunder sedanThe relatively slow depreciation of GPU value is an artifact of supply constraints. If you run fp4 inference and could choose freely between Hopper and a Rubin, the performance per watt would make the Hopper unattractive even if you paid zero for the hardware and only for the power.
You can't get the Rubin, or even the Blackwell, so you will pay for the H100 but this won't last if fabs ramp up capacity.
- narrator - 3102 sekunder sedanOne data point: 512GB Mac Studios are selling on ebay for double what they were selling for new at the beginning of the year.
- cmiles8 - 2324 sekunder sedanAll indications are there will be a lot of repossessed GPUs appearing on the market before too long. Likely to be messy for a while but will open up a lot of possibilities when it’s easy to get your hands on some secondhand GPUs.
- semiquaver - 8462 sekunder sedanMaybe this article has something useful to say but the painfully LLM-generated prose is too distracting to make it evident.
- acd - 7783 sekunder sedanUsed GPU hosting for pension funds.
You go to ebay search for a used GPU. You get a price.
Neither is used servers a new thing or used routers. There are established used server companies.
- Zigurd - 3984 sekunder sedanTime to dig up the spreadsheet models of what dark fiber is worth.
- 1-6 - 4574 sekunder sedanThe GPU cluster's RAM is probably worth more than the flops these days.
- grim_io - 6167 sekunder sedanNothing, because those "GPU's" are special proprietary hardware and are not what most people are capable of plugging in into anything.
- - 7138 sekunder sedan
- latchkey - 6943 sekunder sedanI 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.
- pier25 - 5537 sekunder sedanso when will xAI default on its debt?
- BenFranklin100 - 7115 sekunder sedanWould 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 - 6848 sekunder sedanso 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.
- Joel_Mckay - 3390 sekunder sedanGiven the price for a rack of bc-250 after the crypto hype cycle, the expected value of the hardware will be around 5% to 10% of the original retail price.
Without other market influences, that is a >90% expected discount when the over-provisioned market must inevitably self-correct.
If the Market follows what Samsung/SK Hynix did to the South Korean exchange this week, than the "AI" bubble will hit harder than the dot com crash.
I like the Shrek Movie correlation theory, as they always happen just before Debt-backed investors get hit hard... And the new film is due out in 2027. =3
- DiabloD3 - 4094 sekunder sedanGPU clusters have, largely, no actual value.
If anything, you might have to pay to have them disposed of, they don't really have any meaningful used eBay market outside of the randos that want to do high end extreme local inference in their basement.
Also, as for RAMmageddon, the inference SBCs that all of the AI bros bought don't have DIMMs, they're not even the right chip: its all GDDR and LPDDR. The only DDR DIMMs being consumed are for regular non-inference machines that help run the business and service infrastructure behind the scenes.
- busymom0 - 3659 sekunder sedan> Silent data corruption (SDC) is the most expensive, where a faulty GPU produces wrong answers without crashing anything, which means a multi-day training run can complete normally and the resulting model weights are quietly poisoned.
Anyone know how these get caught ultimately?
- timmmmmmay - 4330 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- cgyvbunji - 6311 sekunder sedanIf nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth it means nobody is doing anything important with GPUs - time to short everything. Do you believe it?