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.

• harry8

  today at 10:32 PM

  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.

  • wmf

    today at 10:38 PM

    Something is probably happening but I don't know what it is. Maybe this is really a negotiation over price.

  • cyanydeez

    today at 10:57 PM

    OpenAI is a unreliable narrator as long as Sam is in charge. Full stop. EM_DASH.

    • reilly3000

      today at 11:22 PM

      Yes and CNBC is comically payola content. I just want to know who’s buying.

  • collabs

    today at 10:39 PM

    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.

  • TacticalCoder

    today at 10:44 PM

    > CNBC are clueleess?

    That sounds about right.

    > People at openai are lying to cnbc?

    Remove "to cnbc" and that's a yes.

    > cnbc are fabricating stories while drunk?

    Maybe not drunk but likely high.

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.

• paxys

  today at 10:10 PM

  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.

  • epolanski

    today at 10:55 PM

    > 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.

    That's exactly the point.

    Performance/watt is increasing so much gen-to-gen that it makes no longer sense to run older hardware.

    Not my words, Jensen's.

  • tryauuum

    today at 10:36 PM

    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

    • baby_souffle

      today at 10:56 PM

      Well technically true, I would wager that the home lab is going to require increasingly distinct and unusual adaptations to retrofit the hardware to home use.

      New stuff is all liquid cooled by default and that's a paradigm shift for your average home lab.

      I'm less aware of exactly what's happening on the power side of things but I think some of the architectures are now moving to relatively high voltage DC throughout and then down converting it to low voltage right before it's used. So not exactly just plug-and-play with your average nema15 outlet.

  • TacticalCoder

    today at 10:52 PM

    > I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.

    There are PCIe versions of these right? And another comment is saying there are PCI adapters too. It "only" requires 600 to 700W. It's not out of reach for everybody.

    If the used regular server market is any indication, you can find, after a few years, a lot of enterprise gear at totally discounted prices. CPU costing $4K brand new for $100 after a few years: stuff like that.

    A friend has got a 42U rack and so do some homelab'ers. People have been running GPU farms mining cryptocurrencies or doing "transcoding" (for money).

    It's not just CPUs at 1/40th of their brand new price: network gear too. And ECC RAM (before the recent RAM craze).

    I'm pretty sure that if H200 begin to flood the used market, people shall quickly adapt.

    > 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.

    I agree with that. But if they resell old H200s, people are resourceful and shall find a way to run these.

    • drivebyhooting

      today at 11:09 PM

      Where do you find such deals

• exikyut

  today at 11:15 PM

  [delayed]

• throwup238

  today at 10:19 PM

  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.

• MisterTea

  today at 10:00 PM

  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.

• observationist

  today at 10:15 PM

  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.

• u1hcw9nx

  today at 10:01 PM

  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.

• jdiez17

  today at 10:10 PM

  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.

  • wtallis

    today at 11:22 PM

    That might work to some extent with the DDR5 DIMMs connected to the CPUs, but is thoroughly impossible for the HBM DRAM stacks packaged with the GPUs.

  • Avicebron

    today at 10:27 PM

    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.

    • Gigachad

      today at 10:39 PM

      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.

• zasz

  today at 9:58 PM

  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.

  • latchkey

    today at 11:06 PM

    I previously ran 150,000 AMD gpus in all conditions at 100% utilization for years. I currently have a multi-million $ cluster of enterprise AMD GPUs.

    A couple real world points:

    1. They generally don't just fail. More likely a repairable component on a board fails and you can send it out to be repaired.

    2. For my current stuff, I have a 3 year pro support contract that can be extended. Anything happens, Dell goes and fixes it. We also haven't had someone in our cage at the DC in over 6 months now.

• AlotOfReading

  today at 9:50 PM

  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.

• h4kunamata

  today at 10:34 PM

  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.

  • Gigachad

    today at 10:38 PM

    The data center owners aren't the ones selling new GPUs.

    • alphager

      today at 10:47 PM

      They are selling access to GPU computation. Seeking their used GPUs would flood the market with cheap competitors using their old GPUs.

      • Gigachad

        today at 10:56 PM

        If the GPUs were competitive with their own, they wouldn't be selling them off.

• latchkey

  today at 11:03 PM

  This article misses the point that people are still actively running older compute.

>> Oracle is the only one using debt to build the data center

Stargate is backed by the US gvt hence why they're comfortable to put that under debt financing

• hyperbovine

  today at 11:07 PM

  Learn from the best!

Is it possible that the supply of used GPUs available to home builders will somehow increase as the result of this?

• llm_nerd

  today at 10:02 PM

  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.

Perhaps oracle going bust can be the silver lining to an AI bubble bursting

The only thing that matters is stonk++

• john_strinlai

  today at 9:46 PM

  too bad stonk is down 23% this year. i think they are doing it wrong

  • 0cf8612b2e1e

    today at 11:18 PM

    I never thought I would see the day, but my stodgy, lumbering company just banned new Oracle databases. Everyone hates Oracle, and only does business out of necessity. I think more and more companies are trying to extricate themselves from Oracle legal, so Oracle needs a new way to leech onto corporations for the coming decades. AI is the best play in sight.

  • conductr

    today at 10:38 PM

    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

• munk-a

  today at 9:41 PM

  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.

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!

• happyopossum

  today at 9:15 PM

  TFA says nothing about taxpayer money - this is about Oracle taking on debt...

• keeganpoppen

  today at 9:25 PM

  what taxpayer money?

  • slopinthebag

    today at 10:07 PM

    The inevitable bailout.

• coliveira

  today at 9:05 PM

  While Trump is in power, the bail out is a sure thing.

  • nine_zeros

    today at 9:15 PM

    [dead]

This is a pretty damning headline and we are still talking about Blackwell. I guess that is how fast the whole segment is moving but OpenAI and only looking for the most advanced chips feels more like an excuse to walk away from this deal rather than a problem with the stack and oracle. Feels to me that OpenAI is cutting down on commitments and cost as it doesn’t see the revenue pipeline building. May be someone with more knowledge of the reality can comment and correct me