Even is the AI bubble does not pops, your prediction about those servers being available on ebay in 10 years will likely be true, because some datacenters will simply upgrade their hardware and resell their old ones to third parties.
Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.
It's kind of like buying a used GeForce 980Ti in 2025. Would anyone buy them and run them besides out of nostalgia or curiosity? Just the power draw makes them uneconomical to run.
Much more likely every single H100 that exists today becomes e-waste in a few years. If you have need for H100-level compute you'd be able to buy it in the form of new hardware for way less money and consuming way less power.
For example if you actually wanted 980Ti-level compute in a desktop today you can just buy a RTX5050, which is ~50% faster, consumes half the power, and can be had for $250 brand new. Oh, and is well-supported by modern software stacks.
I think the existence of a pretty large secondary market for enterprise servers and such kind of shows that this won't be the case.
Sure, if you're AWS and what you're selling _is_ raw compute, then couple generation old hardware may not be sufficiently profitable for you anymore... but there are a lot of other places that hardware could be applied to with different requirements or higher margins where it may still be.
Even if they're only running models a generation or two out of date, there are a lot of use cases today, with today's models, that will continue to work fine going forward.
And that's assuming it doesn't get replaced for some other reason that only applies when you're trying to sell compute at scale. A small uptick in the failure rate may make a big dent at OpenAI but not for a company that's only running 8 cards in a rack somewhere and has a few spares on hand. A small increase in energy efficiency might offset the capital outlay to upgrade at OpenAI, but not for the company that's only running 8 cards.
I think there's still plenty of room in the market in places where running inference "at cost" would be profitable that are largely untapped right now because we haven't had a bunch of this hardware hit the market at a lower cost yet.
And 40 P40 GPUs that cost very little, which are a bit slow but with 24gb per gpu they're pretty useful for memory bandwidth bound tasks (and not horribly noncompetitive in terms of watts per TB/s).
Given highly variable time of day power it's also pretty useful to just get 2x the computing power (at low cost) and just run it during the low power cost periods.
So I think datacenter scrap is pretty useful.
Unlike the investments in railways or telephone cables or roads or any other sort of architecture, this investment has a very short lifespan.
Their point was that whatever your take on AI, the present investment in data centres is a ridiculous waste and will always end up as a huge net loss compared to most other investments our societies could spend it on.
Maybe we'll invent AGI and he'll be proven wrong as they'll pay back themselves many times over, but I suspect they'll ultimately be proved right and it'll all end up as land fill.
I think we would get all this technology without going to the moon or Space Shuttle program. GPS, for example, was developed for military applications initially.
Imagine if Columbus verified that the New World existed, planted a flag, came back - and then everything was cancelled. Or similarly for literally any colonization effort ever. That was the one downside of the space race - what we did was completely nonsensical, and made sense only because of the context of it being a 'race' and politicians having no greater vision than beyond the tip of their nose.
The servers will be replaced, the networking equipment will be replaced. The building will still be useful, the fiber that was pulled to internet exchanges/etc will still be useful, the wiring to the electric utility will still be useful (although I've certainly heard stories of datacenters where much of the floor space is unusable, because power density of racks has increased and the power distribution is maxed out)
What kind of disk and how much memory is in there?
Datacenters could go into the business of making personal PC's or workstations using the older NVIDIA cards and sell them.