I hope not though, perhaps I can pick up a H100 in a few years if they get sold on the open market.
Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often).
In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...)
And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view (and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...)
An on-prem data center means:
- You need to account for electricity costs - i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates.
- cooling and power backup capability - Smaller factor but real
- personnel cost - e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case.
- whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs
- Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware)
- the cost of licensing whatever is running
- In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.)
- OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document.
Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.
why would anyone sign such a contract?
If you want to switch back to on prem, there's probably a way to structure acquiring hardware so it doesn't break the contract. Maybe you lease it, maybe the purchase happens through a related company, maybe there was no way for the contracted cloud to find out...
Plausible - the hardware might be leased, and so you have no right to modify it. You have to pay them to modify it.
Same as if you leased a car, you cannot do the services yourself, you have to pay them (and an approved agent of theirs) to do it.
It will be perfect for stuff like GPU-accelerated query engines, "classical ML" and every other CPU-based workload that could conceivably be offloaded to GPU
Is the idea that previously maintaining GPU programs was expensive whereas now AI makes it cheap? If so, I could buy that line of reasoning.
Maybe relatedly, I expect (hope) the hardware manufacturers will ramp up supply in the meanwhile which would also put downward pressure on GPUs. Right now though this hardware crunch is making me sad, not even because of GPUs but also because of general memory / disk.
You can get used 16GB P100s on AliExpress for ~$100 if you want obsolete GPUs. Allegedly new AMD BC 250s are only slightly more.
I've looked at this some but I already have a GTX1070 which is only supported upto CUDA 11.9.
That's precludes some interesting modern optimizations out of the box. I've spend a lot of LLM tokens backporting some things, but I'm really not sure the hassle is worth it.
New hardware is just better. I think in maybe 5 years when supply and demand are back in equilibrium we are going to have some killer technology for decent prices, and 15yo H100s won't look attractive.
This is assuming that there is no big, big disruption to the semiconductor industry (e.g. TSMC getting attacked), in which case... well, I am gonna treat each stick of RAM I currently have like it's a faberge egg.
In a recent Gamer Nexus video with Level 1 Tech, they mention V100s are also quite useful for many applications that use FP64: stuff four in a workstation, and many PhD candidates would be quite happy with the throughput they can get for certain scenarios.
TL;DR.
> I, for one, welcome the coming age of the post-LLM-datacenter-overinvestment-bust-fueled backyard GPU supercomputer revolution.
> The Big Question is…
> Who is cultivating the option to snap up and repurpose vapourised datacenter investments at fire sale prices, soon as the "datacenter debt" cometh calling?
Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.
These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.
And precisely because it's such a huge headache to do yourself, I think a small company could make a nice business wrapping up used datacenter cards in that sort of server.
The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models.
Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.
A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.
My home still has 100 amp service (as does almost the whole city, most of it is a historic district), but it was built in 1910 so that's not shocking.
> A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.
Oh yeah, I was mostly talking about having to upgrade the service to the house from the pole. A new circuit with a single outlet isn't horribly expensive, but needing to upgrade service is pretty rough.
But I never assumed it was to be cost competitive at current token rates. I assumed it was for the same reasons people might use open source hardware. Freedom to tinker, etc.
Models are too big now
if you haven't heard a 5u server intended for a datacenter rack come to life it's quite the experience. Sounds like a plane taking off.
Until the thermal management kicks in, they sound like jet planes. When the thermal management starts and assesses the required cooling, it’ll throttle down the fans to reasonable levels.
That is, until the moment you push the machine to its limits. When then happens, you might get back to the same levels of the boot time, but it’ll require you to push everything to the max - CPU, memory, storage (all 24 bays) and so on. For a normal user, there is a lot of room and it’s virtually impossible, even with a dozen of Teams windows open.
If these do end up in Home Labs, it's going to be a server rack in the basement and not the server rack at the other end of the room.
If they are too loud, yes. In my part of the world basements are not common, but my shed would be a sensible place for one.
Helicopter. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK - there's a helicopter factory just down the road. I had a IBM "AS/400" or whatever they are called now in our computer room rack for a customer and it made nearly as much noise as everything else put together. It was clearly tuned for start up noise to impress because they would fire up in sequence, rise to a crescendo and then slow down in sequence to just a din instead of painfully loud.
A switch or PC server on boot will normally run up cooling fans instantly to max as a default protection mechanism until the "OS" has started and sensors read and then the fans will slow down to deal with the actual thermal load.
If you switch off your air conn, it gets noisy, quickly. Recently in the UK we are seeing routine temperatures around 30C and we broke 200 odd year records for temperatures a few weeks back. I know its even worse elsewhere but our infrastructure is not designed for this. Here we are at the same latitude as Calgary AB!
Anyway, what is it good for? To not overload the PSU for one, because spin-up needs more energy, until it has reached it's intended range of RPM. (for fans & HDDs)
Another reason to spin-up high initially, to fall down to slower when up, is to overcome friction in the bearings, to get stuck things unstuck, and shake dust off. (for fans)
The PSUs are painting their nails when the fans go off initially. The GPUs, RAID controllers and co are still waking up.
A further counter example is an Equallogic PS6500. That has 48 3.5" spindles in it and three PSUs plus a few fans and two controllers. The whole thing boots in a couple of minutes.
You don't need much of a fan if you are prepared to pump a lot of water.
I mean, sure, if you're trying to cool the thing with 100ml of water, then yeah, you need a fan.
OTOH I have an unused car radiator in my garage, a quiet and cheap pump, and space to hang that radiator outside the window. It's barely an afternoon's worth of work if the H100s already have liquid-cooling intakes/exhausts on them already (I dunno, I have never seen one in the flesh).
I'm pretty certain 10+ litres of constantly circulating water (antifreeze, in my case) through a car radiator would be sufficient to cool down 2x H100s. Hell, add in 10 RPM used car cooling fan and I can probably cool 20x of those running at full-bore.
If anyone wants to ship me a bunch of H100s, I'll happily build it all out, take pics and videos and post it back here. Just sayin' :-)
Most homes in the US have 200 amp service. That's 48 kW of power available to the house, though code states that you can only pull 80% of that continuously, so 160 amp/38.4 kW.
The 120V misconception comes from the fact that it is delivered as split phase on two 120V legs. Any competent electrician can run a 240V, 50-amp (40 amps/9.6 kW continuous) circuit to any room in a house. Plenty of homes have these circuits for electric ranges, EV chargers, or RV power outlets, and there's nothing stopping anyone from having one of these circuits installed in whatever room they'd like it installed in.
Heck, my old landlord and I installed one ourselves to provide an outlet for an EV charger in the garage of a house I lived in about a decade ago.
400 amp and even higher service is available, though it is fairly uncommon. Plenty of large houses will have a 400-amp service, though, which means you can double the power numbers available that I mentioned above.
We have 50 amp service running a hot tub and another 50 amp service line to charge an electric car.
The quotes are in since the difference between the phases is 230V, but in practice it is almost the same as a 40Ax400V single phase connection.
But its very common to have many 15amp and 240V lines run in a house in Canada.
My kitchen alone has 4 different lines. i don't think your scenario is all that uncommon given that almost all new builds will have the same lines run in their home.
In North America we are on 120V, making a standard 15A outlet only 1500W max, and something like 1200W sustained. To use higher wattage appliances, we have to upgrade our outlets to 20A (2000/1600W) or up our voltage to 240V, but that carries a different set of plugs and outlets as well.
You’re limited to 24kW per leg if you ran everything only on 120V, but any really large server is going to be running off 240V anyways.
It's 1800W for short periods and 1500W sustained.
Realistically, a 15A breaker won’t trip on a 2,300 watt load for at least a few minutes, and often not until a few hours. A listed breaker is expected to trip in several seconds to 3 minutes for a 3,600 watt continuous load.
Take all those numbers and go up by 33% for a house or apartment with 20A circuits (quite common). Go up by 667% for an oven plug.
As anyone who takes care of rentals during winter knows, a typical circuit can tolerate two 1,500 W space heaters without tripping very much (although this is unsafe and a bad idea).
He hated outlets, and hardwired almost every appliance directly into whatever circuit was closest that fit the amperage, including literally cutting the plug off a cord, to nut the wires directly into the Romex.
I still haven't found what circuit my range hood is on. I turned off all 120V and it remained blowing, and knowing grandpa, he powered it off a single leg of a 240V. And I know he didn't use junction boxes, so the splices are likely all inside the walls.
One that runs continuously
1500W is the power of the typical American microwave or (tea) kettle at 120V. (Convert over to a NEMA 6 plug and dual-pole breaker and you can get 3000W.)
3000W is nothing special in the rest of the world with >200V wall plugs.
Right, so they're not voluntary.
1. There is one supplier, so you have no choice. 2. Even if you had a choice to sign the contract, this still means that it's not the same as a trade-in, because trade-ins are always voluntary, but once you have signed the contract, a right of first refusal is not.
In general, the "you chose to sign the contract" argument is a poor justification for bad contracts. If the contract is bad, it is bad regardless of whether you chose to sign it.
As businesses are expected to be more informed and equal in the negotiations
I don’t understand the desire to tell totally anonymous third parties the terms under which they are allowed to deal with each other.
Many kinds of contracts are illegal, including those that are anticompetitive in certain ways.
> Should I be allowed to pay a landscaper less if I agree to not do part of the work myself?
No?
By doing that, you know upfront what the value of your used hardware will be at the time you decommission it. It removes a lot of the risk for buyers in a volatile market.
I don't think they need some special protection against this kind of contract.
For example, when I worked at a VFX software company, we were exclusively with one hardware partner. This unlocked something like a 50% discount across all our infra needs (they were big enough to provide switches, racks, servers, storage)
another company it unlocked a 75% discount.
a) It's not fraudulent, and
b) Nvidia has already signed on to buyback any unused capacity from the DCs it is selling to.
https://electrek.co/2026/04/11/tesla-signature-series-model-...