I don't believe that Stargate is "yesterday's data center". It's being built in multiple phases and Oracle has access to Nvidia's roadmap. They know 200 kW/rack is coming. The newer phases could easily be built out to support Rubin and Feynman.
So what's the theory that goes with this about why cnbc are reporting that openai are walking because they want newer nvidia hardware? CNBC are clueleess? People at openai are lying to cnbc? cnbc are fabricating stories while drunk?
There has to be some theory to explain the story to be consistent with this comment.
Something is probably happening but I don't know what it is. Maybe this is really a negotiation over price.
I agree with you more than I agree with the parent comment.
To use the hit HBO TV show silicon valley analogy, it is far more likely that "the bear is sticky with honey" will happen at Oracle than at Open AI. Some kind of game of telephone gone wrong at some point and now the people responsible at Oracle must double down in order to kick the can to the next quarter and not appear clueless.
Statutory disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Open AI or Oracle and have no insider information. All of this is mere conjecture and has no basis in reality.
What happens to older datacenter GPUs? Do they have a second life somewhere outside of datacenters?
I could see Nvidia adding terms of sale requiring disposal rather than resale.
Plenty of enterprise server hardware (racks, servers, RAM, disks) does have an active secondhand market after 3-5 years of use, but I think GPUs are too specialized for it to be viable. I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.
I also don't think companies are going to have mandatory replacement cycles for GPU hardware the same way they do for everything else, because:
1. It is an order or magnitude (or more) more expensive.
2. It isn't clear whether Moore's law will apply to the AI GPU space the same way it has for everything else.
Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.
you can absolutely run e.g. datacenter-level A100 at home, there are adapters from the SXM to the PCIe socket. Haven't seen people running SXM versions of H100s this way but this could be due to the price factor only
Depending on the elemental composition, it could definitely be worthwhile to recycle wherever scale is practical. For giant datacenters and companies using hundreds of thousands or millions of gpus, that adds up to a lot of gold and other valuable elements.
In order to take advantage of that, someone needs to be positioned to process all that material economically, and to make the logistics achievable by the big players. If it costs Facebook $10million to store and transport phased out gpus vs just sending them to a landfil, they're not going to do it. If they get $100k for recycling - probably not going to do it. If they pocket $5 million, they will definitely contract that out, especially if it costs $50 million to build out the infrastructure to handle it.
Probably a good company idea - transport, disposal, refurbishment of out of cycle GPUs and datacenter assets, creating a massive recycling pipeline for recapturing all the valuable elements is a pretty good niche.
It's likely the GPU boards are designed for water cooled data center racks and might not fit in a regular PC case. It's also possible the PCB the GPU's are mounted to might not be standard PCIe cards that fit into an ATX case.
I bought a used NEC SX Aurora TSUBASA (PCIe x16 board that looks like a GPU board) and realized it has no fans. The server case it is designed to fit into is pressurized by fans forcing air through eight cards on a special 4 + 4 slot motherboard. I have to stack and mount three 40mm fans on the back.
They are build to physically last 5-7 years in 24/7 datacenter use, but they have effective lifetime just 3-4 years, then their value has deprecated and electricity and infrastructure cost dominates. Meta did a benchmark where 9% of the chips failed every year, 'infant mortality' is much higher in the first 3 months of use.
Last I checked AWS is still offering g4dn instances that run on NVIDIA T4 GPUs, which were first released in 2018. I think most people underestimate how long superscalers can keep these things running profitably after they depreciate, and you probably don’t want anything they throw away.
My last employer is still running a bunch of otherwise discontinued g3 instances with 2015 era GPUs.
Bin!!
Why would them sell it cheaper to the 2nd market??
It will hurt the sales of new ones. This is the way even with food, let alone technology. Don't expect to buy cheaper 2nd GPU any century soon.
The data center owners aren't the ones selling new GPUs.
It seems like GPUs with a high utilization rate (60%+) degrade after 1-3 years: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...
Would be interested to know if others have takes on this.
I've written about this elsewhere but I predict there will be a significant secondary market for repurposing parts of datacenter GPUs (for example, RAM chips) by desoldering them and soldering them onto new PCBs that fit PC/consumer use cases.
I wish there to be an active market like what Gamer's Nexus covered in China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI&t=1577s
in the States.
It's all about the cost of labor. In the US you could not find someone capable of soldering BGA chips for a price that makes sense doing.
You send them back to Nvidia or a third party e-waste recycler at end of life. Sometimes they're resold and reused, but my understanding is that most are eventually processed for materials.
Is it possible that the supply of used GPUs available to home builders will somehow increase as the result of this?
Data centres are actually prohibited from using consumer level GPUs via license restrictions. The GPUs they use are largely SXM (server connector) and if you did somehow get one of the PCIe variants (with enormous power and cooling needs) most don't even support gaming APIs.
This is general compute hardware as I understand it. It will not go unused no matter what happens. If new algorithms appear that reduce the number of calculations needed per token for an llm they are probably still good. It's not like silicon advances are accelerating.
If it's built in stages each state will have never variants of hardware I imagine.
The only thing that matters is stonk++
too bad stonk is down 23% this year. i think they are doing it wrong
It’s a huge gamble but they have no choice but to take it. Most their software will be rendered obsolete by AI (I’ve vibecoded replacements saving millions already, companies everywhere are doing this right now).
So they have to hope they’re a part of the future in the AI capacity because their SaaS business is going to take a big hit.
YTD performance didn’t fully bake this reality in. It was seen as them having 2 huge revenue streams, the market is realizing that AI is a threat to SaaS and baking that into stonks
The actions of oracle lately seem extremely misaligned to maximize stonks - it's extremely political, more than is necessary to merely keep in the good graces of the current administration.
What the article did not mention is that oracle founder, executive chairman and biggest stockholder larry ellison is currently bankrolling his kid David's bid to monopolize the entire US news industry so that they are more friendly to Trump, Netanyahu and various other right wing ideologists.
David Ellison is fueling his buying spree with debt guaranteed by his dad's oracle shares. The various assets David has bought are already suffering losses of viewership because viewers are turned off by their new ideological slant.
Usually debt investors are not worried if the stock price is high. Debt has precedence over equity, so if the stock price is riding high, the CEO can always be convinced to print more shares to service the debt. The Oracle stock price has not been doing that hot lately, however. As the article said, it is 50% down. Still ORCL has 430 Billion market cap in comparison with 130 Billion of debt. It seems manageable. But stock prices can move very fast. Ironically, the war in Iran, which David's new news sources keep supporting is causing ORCL stock to go down which can bring down David's new media empire.
David just purchased Warner Bros for about 110. A lot of that (40 billion) is also guaranteed by daddy's ORCL shares. Warner Bros owns Comedy Central, which sadly has been one of Americas most dependable news sources.
The house of cards is still standing but its getting awfully wobbly.
Perhaps oracle going bust can be the silver lining to an AI bubble bursting
to me, seems the page is gone. This could be a related item:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/as-oracle-plans-thou...
Omg. Oracle taking greedy bad decisions with tax payer money? No way!
TFA says nothing about taxpayer money - this is about Oracle taking on debt...
what taxpayer money?
The inevitable bailout.
While Trump is in power, the bail out is a sure thing.