I suspect relatively few Blackwell DGX GB200 servers will become e-waste in the near future. Look how much an A100 goes for on eBay today. Even if/when the AI bubble bursts there will be buyers for this stuff for years to come. I do suspect people will break it down to smaller components at some point as relatively few people are happy about running a 200kw rack. If these do end up as waste in the next decade I'll be diving into the skip to retrieve them.
I think that you are right. We can already see this happening on Aliexpress where one can buy cheap X99 ATX motherboards, which are build around LGA2011-3 to take Intel Xeon E5, which is server processor from 10 years ago. Elegant repurposing of old e-waste.
A6000/A100/H100/etc will sell like hotcakes to hobbyists and small companies when data centers start to get rid of them (if they're allowed to). the market is starved for affordable hardware. P40 was <100$ 1.5 years ago, now it's 250$+
As one example take a peek at /r/LocalLLaMA[0] (I suspect you know). These people are snapping up anything and everything they can get their hands on at a reasonable price.
To your point on the P40, it's an eight year old card but fortunately Nvidia has a history of long term support (especially for "datacenter" GPUs). The Pascal series is still fully supported by the latest Nvidia driver and CUDA releases, and projects like llama.cpp are still fairly regularly adding performance optimizations for even Maxwell series GPUs!
Current V100/A100/H100/etc hardware families are not going to end up as e-waste anytime soon. In fact, compare used pricing (and demand) of GPUs to CPUs, RAM, disk, motherboards, etc from eight years ago... That hardware ends up in the trash/at e-waste recyclers much, much sooner (even with /r/homelab).
We have a whole lot of problems in the world, and yes we can walk and chew gum (mostly), but trash piles is the least concerning to me. Properly disposed of e-waste is not a problem, and our dumps are not threatening to over-run the countryside. The biggest problems with generative AI from an environmental perspective is carbon production, and it seems that nuclear is being re-implemented (maybe not fast enough for climate change). Existential threats from AI are also very concerning (we will see if its a jobs threat), and include malicious propaganda, biological and chemical weapons. But there is also hope that the speed of science will increase with AI, which perhaps at least could help solve issues with climate change, even if the cleaner environment is only enjoyed by rogue terminators.
I suspect relatively few Blackwell DGX GB200 servers will become e-waste in the near future. Look how much an A100 goes for on eBay today. Even if/when the AI bubble bursts there will be buyers for this stuff for years to come. I do suspect people will break it down to smaller components at some point as relatively few people are happy about running a 200kw rack. If these do end up as waste in the next decade I'll be diving into the skip to retrieve them.
I think that you are right. We can already see this happening on Aliexpress where one can buy cheap X99 ATX motherboards, which are build around LGA2011-3 to take Intel Xeon E5, which is server processor from 10 years ago. Elegant repurposing of old e-waste.
A6000/A100/H100/etc will sell like hotcakes to hobbyists and small companies when data centers start to get rid of them (if they're allowed to). the market is starved for affordable hardware. P40 was <100$ 1.5 years ago, now it's 250$+
As one example take a peek at /r/LocalLLaMA[0] (I suspect you know). These people are snapping up anything and everything they can get their hands on at a reasonable price.
To your point on the P40, it's an eight year old card but fortunately Nvidia has a history of long term support (especially for "datacenter" GPUs). The Pascal series is still fully supported by the latest Nvidia driver and CUDA releases, and projects like llama.cpp are still fairly regularly adding performance optimizations for even Maxwell series GPUs!
Current V100/A100/H100/etc hardware families are not going to end up as e-waste anytime soon. In fact, compare used pricing (and demand) of GPUs to CPUs, RAM, disk, motherboards, etc from eight years ago... That hardware ends up in the trash/at e-waste recyclers much, much sooner (even with /r/homelab).
[0] - https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
What is a good place for buying used servers / GPU's for when the AI bubble bursts?
eBay? Technically this happened a few years ago when Ethereum moved away from PoW. E.g. https://taiwannews.com.tw/news/4489269, https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-decreased-demand-means-gpu.... I expect any AI reset to be similar.
Seems stupid to assume such strong exponential growth.
Good news for homelabbers and bootstrappers.
We have a whole lot of problems in the world, and yes we can walk and chew gum (mostly), but trash piles is the least concerning to me. Properly disposed of e-waste is not a problem, and our dumps are not threatening to over-run the countryside. The biggest problems with generative AI from an environmental perspective is carbon production, and it seems that nuclear is being re-implemented (maybe not fast enough for climate change). Existential threats from AI are also very concerning (we will see if its a jobs threat), and include malicious propaganda, biological and chemical weapons. But there is also hope that the speed of science will increase with AI, which perhaps at least could help solve issues with climate change, even if the cleaner environment is only enjoyed by rogue terminators.
I agree. Weirdly, perhaps one of the most harmful parts of e-waste is how valuable it can be: https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/10/05/g-s1-....
I think the key word there is "properly." Mass exporting of e-waste to poorer countries from richer ones is hardly proper.