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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

The real shame with all of this is that when (not if) the AI bubble pops, it's going to be like the 1990's, when there was a huge supply of unix workstations, etc.

The difference is that none of this Nvidia gear can run on normal 120V (or even 240V) circuits, so it'll end up going to the landfill or just being powered down in place.

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If I acquire some cheap H200s, I intend to build a rack mount power supply that I can feed from a dryer plug. 4x H200's need about 2.8KW, which you could pull from a standard 240VAC 20A dryer/oven breaker [0].

[0]: https://www.sunbirddcim.com/blog/nvidia-h200-power-requireme...

2.8KWs is just the GPUs. Add another 400 watt for CPUs and RAM and the rest of the hardware, and then leave at least a 30% headroom for PSU loss and spikes. Suddenly you're close to 4KW. And then of course you'd have to remove all that heat from the room.

Yeah? My shop at home has two 4kw electric heaters in it. That's not even a big deal to wire up to your main panel.

So... a 30A breaker instead of a 20A breaker? And a few hundred bucks creating a venting solution to the outside? I could set this up at my house right now, by myself, in a day, maybe 2.

The 20A breaker already had 30-40% headroom.

You're required to have at least 20% for continuous loads and your breaker may nuisance trip if you don't.

Should be fine, just put in a 60A breaker, 6AWG line, etc. Just like you would for 48A EV charging.

What does it run on?

Not sure what they run on in 2026, but next year, 800V DC, 1MW per rack:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

The graphics cards still take 12V. They're just bringing a higher voltage to the server PSU. That's a forgettable, easily replaceable commodity component.

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