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Comment by Moto7451 | Hacker News Reader

I would in such a scenario expect the GPUs to be dumped to industrial breakers who would send them to China for refurbishment and repackaging before being sold again on Amazon, AliExpress, and Taobao as last gen gaming cards from weird brands and specs.

This is what happened after the great crypto GPU dumping.

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The e-waste recyclers are pretty low on the pecking order, as the creditors will be first to strip these places for assets as Leopold Aschenbrenner discovered. =3

It's where the stuff ultimately goes since the creditors aren't interested in GPUs that no longer have much value. The context here is a crash, not just a basic bankruptcy. If it were that then absolutely it would be impounded by creditors (virtually or in reality) and then sold to the highest bidding data center.

>creditors aren't interested in GPUs that no longer have much value

Indeed, there is a point where the cost of disposal is higher than the expected market value of components. Thus, the asset turns into a liability if held too long.

I have seen factory liquidations, and everything goes... right down to the bolts in the floors. =3

Honestly can't wait for that to happen, same with memory, drives, etc. There's going to be a massive amount of server pulls hitting the market.

Yeah, I ment it as a joke - I agree with you. Watched the Gamers Nexus GPU investigation recently, where they were shown how a chinese soldering shop can transplant GPU chips to a new board, including memory chip reuse.

Hopefully we can look forward to all that useless datacenter AI crap gets repurposed in a similar manner into something actually useful for users.

I wouldnt be so hopeful because they dont use commodity hardware afaik How are you going to use a h100 at home?

with the same tricks gamers have always used? Modded drivers, undervolting, etc.?

Exactly + you can harvest the HBM memory on chip level & resolder on custom boards usable in PCs as VRAM (with scavenged GPU) or as normal RAM sticks.

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