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points by LarsDu88 3 days ago | 0 comments
Possible data center bans incoming + tons of GPUs sitting in warehouses due to lack of power infrastructure to power them.

Perhaps a flood of 8x B300 will be homelab ready in a few months

[–] x187463 3 days ago
The world is bigger than the US. If the political climate in the US obstructs the build out, the build out will occur somewhere else.
[–] fauigerzigerk 3 days ago
I agree, but it would have to be a place with plenty of energy and the only such place outside the US is a war zone.

Perhaps one option is building data centers along with solar power plants in sunny countries that have a lot of space. I'm not sure about the water/cooling situation though.

[–] SR2Z 3 days ago
Well, lots of countries have energy surpluses from hydro or cheap coal.

It would certainly fit the pattern of Bitcoin farms clustering near dams.

[–] fauigerzigerk 3 days ago
Wasn't that mostly China? It would have to be countries that are not under chip sanctions.
[–] seviu 3 days ago
It’s called pacing the frontier
[–] swingandamiss 3 days ago
No, they'll be shipped off to Asia where technology is embraced.
[–] DaSHacka 3 days ago
The rise of China due to hand-over-fist ceeding of power and influence fueled in equal parts by the right and left is so astonishing it'll certainly go down in the history books (written in Mandarin, of course).

Bonus points when the morons are doing so because they get all their political news from a Chinese platform. The [Americans] have gone insane.

[–] mullingitover 3 days ago
The rise of China is due to the tyranny of the markets and the fact that firms laser-focused on quarterly growth buy and liquidate those trying to do responsible, sustained growth. Those that sold their factories were able to swallow domestic competitors who didn’t do so.

The political system just does whatever the captains of industry tell them to do.

[–] viccis 3 days ago
>Possible data center bans incoming

A lot of the data center build out has been bipartisan. Unless Dems realize they need to listen to their constituents to avoid a 2028 bloodbath (they probably won't), I wouldn't count on that to save us from RAM/GPU prices.

[–] FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago
There are 300 racks of nVidia A100 servers for sale from a refurber right now on eBay...
[–] NitpickLawyer 3 days ago
> a flood of 8x B300 will be homelab ready in a few months

Haha, that's beyond wishful thinking, I'm afraid. We're not even seeing a flood of A100s (6 yo and several generations old). Every GPU is still being squeezed right now, and the trend will probably continue for the foreseeable future.

[–] throwup238 3 days ago
Last I checked AWS still sells EC2 instances using 2018 era GPUs. Most people underestimate just how much long tail demand there is and how long these cards last, despite the higher power consumption.
[–] fauigerzigerk 3 days ago
Yes, but if data center space gets tight, it creates an incentive to replace old inefficient models with better ones, i.e. sqeueeze more performance out of limited data center space.
[–] thway15269037 3 days ago
IIRC some companies were running campaigns like "we buy your old hardware so you won't sell it in aftermarket and crash the prices". It all ends in landfill.

I wouldn't be surprised if RAM cartel or nvidia will attempt something like that, plus nvidia already talks about license-locking GPUs.

Also, again, IIRC, IBM hardware already works this way. There are almost no aftermarket when I last checked for them because it's all locked up and useless.

[–] largbae 3 days ago
Maybe, but A100s and H100s were air cooled. Space is just part of the problem.