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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

What I don't really understand is why the big data centre operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off. What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market would that not increase supply and drive down cost?

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Most data center GPUs don't have display outputs and some use exotic connectors (not PCIe x16 slots), making them worth next to nothing as conventional graphics cards.

It's probably possible to move the rendered frames via PCI Express to another card with video output or perhaps design a custom card that connects via NVLink/Infiniband and provides video out. Or maybe even mount the video out on the GPU motherboard if he graphics chip had support but it's not just not connected to a port.

LTT did something similar with a mining "GPU" several years ago.[0] It involved buying a mining card with modified firmware and installing a modified and unsigned driver which shoved the rendered frames into the integrated GPU to output.

It's possible these datacenter AI GPUs are built so different from conventional GPUs that they lack required hardware to draw polygons, like ROPs and texture units. Why waste chip engineering time and silicon die space to support applications that a product isn't designed for? Let me remind you that gaming is a small slice of NVidia's balance sheet[1], so it makes sense to not have to use one chip design for everything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4

[1] $4.3 billion out of $57 billion https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

Who is buying the old cards? They can't be used for gaming, if there was money to be made I think they would be doing it.

Its just easier to write off the full value as e-waste than to try to turn a profit selling a meager amount of used hardware.

You don't "write off" the full value, you fiddle the amortization so they go to zero accounting value exactly when you want them to. They're playing this exact game with datacentre GPUs right now.

You can still have a tax implication when you sell the fully depreciated item but in theory it should only be a benefit unless your company has a 100% marginal tax rate somehow.

Of course it can cost more to store the goods and administer the sale then you recoup. And the manufacturer may do or even require a buyback to prevent the second hand market undercutting their sales. Or you may be disinclined to provide cheap hardware to your competitors.

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