Yea looking at 60 day moving average on computeprices.com H100 have actually gone UP in cost recently, at least to rent.

A lot of demand out there for sure.

> so maybe you mean you’d love to buy a discounted one

Yes. I'd expect 4 year old hardware used constantly in a datacenter to cost less than when it was new!

(And just in case you did not look carefully, most of the ebay listings are scams. The actual product pictured in those are A100 workstation GPUs.)

Especially since AWS still have p4 instances that are 6 years old A100s. Clearly even for hyperscalers these have a useful life longer than 3 years.

I agree that there is hyperbole thrown around a lot here and its possible to still use some hardware for a long time or to sell it and recover some cost but my experience in planning compute at large companies is that spending money on hardware and upgrading can often result in saving money long term.

Even assuming your compute demands stay fixed, its possible that a future generation of accelerator will be sufficiently more power/cooling efficient for your workload that it is a positive return on investment to upgrade, more so when you take into account you can start depreciating them again.

If your compute demands aren't fixed you have to work around limited floor space/electricity/cooling capacity/network capacity/backup generators/etc and so moving to the next generation is required to meet demand without extremely expensive (and often slow) infrastructure projects.

It's because they run 24/7 in a challenging environment. They will start dying at some point and if you aren't replacing them you will have a big problem when they all die en masse at the same time.

These things are like cars, they don't last forever and break down with usage. Yes, they can last 7 years in your home computer when you run it 1% of the time. They won't last that long in a data center where they are running 90% of the time.

While I'm sure there are small amateur setups done poorly that push cards to their limits this seems like a more rare and inefficient use. GPUS (even used) are expensive and running them at maximum would require large costs and time to be replacing them regularly. Not to mention the increased cost of cooling and power.

Not sure I understand the police raid mentality - why are the police raiding amateur crypto mining setups ?

I can totally see cards used by casual amateurs being very worn / used though - especially your example of single mobo miners who were likely also using the card for gaming and other tasks.

I would imagine that anyone purposely running hardware into the ground would be running cheaper / more efficient ASICS vs expensive Nvidia GPUs since they are much easier and cheaper to replace. I would still be surprised however if most were not proritising temps and cooling

Specifically, we expect a halving of lifetime per 10K increase in temperature.

Let's also not forget the set of miners that either overclock or dont really care about long term in how they set up thermals

Why would police raid a shed housing a compute center?

And yet they aren't running planes and engines all from 2023 or beyond: See the MD-11 that crashed in Louisville: Nobody has made a new MD-11 in over 20 years. Planes move to less competitive routes, change carriers, and eventually might even stop carrying people and switch to cargo, but the plane itself doesn't get to have zero value when the new one comes out. An airline will want to replace their planes, but a new plane isn't fully amortized in a year or three: It still has value for quite a while

I don't think the airline industry is a great example from an IT perspective, but I agree with regard to the aircraft.

Who wants to buy GPUs that were redlined for three years in a data center? Maybe there's a market for those, but most people already seem wary of lightly used GPUs from other consumers, let alone GPUs that were burning in a crypto farm or AI data center for years.

That works either because someone wants to buy old hardware for the manufacturer/lessor, or because the hardware is EOL in 3 years but it's easier to let the lessor deal with recyling / valuable parts recovery.

Not necessarily if you count capital costs vs operating costs/margins.

Replacing cars every 3 years vs a couple % in efficiency is not an obvious trade off. Especially if you can do it in 5 years instead of 3.