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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 b

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.

MrHamburger 2y ago
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.
pornel 2y ago
You're namedropping the hot new card, but every card before it was also the hot new card when it was released. It reminds me of the NEVER OBSOLETE sticker e-machines put on their unbelievably fast 500Mhz Pentium PCs. These cards will inevitably become worse than worthless when the increased running costs of older-generation hardware exceed the cost of buying next-generation hardware. At some point it won't make sense to use more electricity, more cooling, more rack space to run a hospice for old cards, when the same workload can be done easier, quicker, and cheaper on newer hardware, even after adding the cost of buying the new hardware. The Xeons that used to cost $4000 can now be found on eBay for 1% of their original sticker price, because they're so unprofitable to run.
- fancyfredbot 2y ago
  The GB200 is specifically called out by the linked article - I didn't pick it at random. "The researchers point out that the weight of Nvidia's latest Blackwell platform in a rack system — designed for intensive LLM inference, training and data processing tasks — tips the scales at 1.36 tons, demonstrating how material-intensive GenAI can be" While I certainly agree that old Xeons are selling for 1% of their original MSRP, it doesn't really seem like this disagrees with what I'm saying - if someone's buying it for 40$, that's not e-waste (yet). I do agree that eventually things can become e-waste if the initial savings are significantly offset by running costs. However it's not clear how much longer we're going to continue to see such large generational improvements in power efficiency or whether these GB200s will be entirely obsolete when such improvements eventually stop happening.
- Incipient 2y ago
  Those would be 10 year old or so CPUs. Not only is it because they're unprofitable to run, but they're end of life. I know CPUs do and can run longer, but realistically they're towards the end.

MrHamburger 2y ago

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.

pornel 2y ago

You're namedropping the hot new card, but every card before it was also the hot new card when it was released. It reminds me of the NEVER OBSOLETE sticker e-machines put on their unbelievably fast 500Mhz Pentium PCs. These cards will inevitably become worse than worthless when the increased running costs of older-generation hardware exceed the cost of buying next-generation hardware. At some point it won't make sense to use more electricity, more cooling, more rack space to run a hospice for old cards, when the same workload can be done easier, quicker, and cheaper on newer hardware, even after adding the cost of buying the new hardware. The Xeons that used to cost $4000 can now be found on eBay for 1% of their original sticker price, because they're so unprofitable to run.

fancyfredbot 2y ago
The GB200 is specifically called out by the linked article - I didn't pick it at random. "The researchers point out that the weight of Nvidia's latest Blackwell platform in a rack system — designed for intensive LLM inference, training and data processing tasks — tips the scales at 1.36 tons, demonstrating how material-intensive GenAI can be" While I certainly agree that old Xeons are selling for 1% of their original MSRP, it doesn't really seem like this disagrees with what I'm saying - if someone's buying it for 40$, that's not e-waste (yet). I do agree that eventually things can become e-waste if the initial savings are significantly offset by running costs. However it's not clear how much longer we're going to continue to see such large generational improvements in power efficiency or whether these GB200s will be entirely obsolete when such improvements eventually stop happening.
Incipient 2y ago
Those would be 10 year old or so CPUs. Not only is it because they're unprofitable to run, but they're end of life. I know CPUs do and can run longer, but realistically they're towards the end.