this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2026
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Hopefully it involves outdated datacenter GPUs flooding the open market to try and recoup what they can, selling for pennies on the dollar to anyone who will buy them, and thus people figuring out how to adapt these cards to work in consumer systems.
The GPUs they're talking about don't have video outputs, and I think many of them aren't even PCIe. Even at pennies on the dollar, they'll still be hundreds of dollars, so way easier just to get a consumer card.
All the past infrastructure bubbles, the companies that inevitably failed at least left some usable infrastructure - rails, pipelines, dark fiber... These guys are going to crash, never pay back their loans, and the acres of datacenter, containers of GPUs, and racks of servers are just going to get recycled. It's such shocking waste that it's hard to comprehend.
plus all those local governments buying into it, are going to paying out the ass too. its probably going to exist in some form as mass surveillance AI dc.
Hah! I had dark fiber in mind before I hit that part of your comment. Not much of value will be left after the AI implosion.
They really aren't GPUs in the traditional sense. You can't plug them into computers and play games or do rendering. They are meant to sit in datacenter racks and do AI inference, so they are E-waste for any other application. Since we don't have enough demand for inference they will end up on dumps.
I really wonder why they’re being called GPUs and not NPUs — they aren’t primarily designed to process graphics (although they can).
An NVidia GB300 fills a whole rack on a server, doesn't have display outputs, draws 1.4 kW of electrical power, and requires mandatory liquid cooling capable of dissipating 1.4 kW of heat. Not a good match for a standard desktop system. I understand that they're also optimised for churning through huge amounts of low-precision floating point, aka. an AI workload, rather than being truly general-purpose cards.
If you have any use for eye-watering amounts of CUDA calculations, then they might come in handy. I remember back in the day, if you had two graphics cards in SLI, that the Batman: Arkham Asylum game gave you the option of either using both cards for rendering, or one card for rendering and one card dedicated to PhysX calculations. You could use one of these GPUs for amazingly good-looking fog effects, assuming you had another GPU capable of rendering the graphics and outputting it? Not very sensible, tho.
I suspect that unless you work in a very compute-heavy industry (AI research, but maybe aerospace?) then you won't have a use for these cards that would justify how expensive they are to run.
These cards are so specialized only the absolute enthusiasts would bother with them. They’re big, awkward, and very power hungry. Not suitable for any halfway sane person to just have sitting idle 80% of the time. The VAST majority of them will end up as ewaste.
On one hand, we're gonna need a fuckton of Chinese remanufacturing workshops putting these server chips onto regular PC boards, but on the other hand they're all export-restricted so the Chinese are probably going to be keeping any that they manage to get their hands on. So either we're going to have to start a similar remanufacturing cottage industry in the West or we're fucked.
from whats been known, the AI chips arent compatible for personal computers uses.