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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I don't the envisioned scenario is that a data centre company fails and Nvidia starts making RTX 5090s for consumers. Rather, one of these companies fails, their stock of enterprise GPUs gets flooded on the market, and suddenly the people/companies buying RTX 5090s for local inference can buy full fat enterprise GPUs, shifting demand.

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If by enterprise you mean datacenter (which is what CoreWeave is), the "full fat" cards aren't as plug-and-play in a desktop PC as the consumer cards. They don't typically come with fans, and are meant to be cooled using some kind of holistic whole-rack (or larger) setup. Hobbyists do sometimes buy datacenter GPUs secondhand (and I have considered it, for the price/performance ratio) but it's kind of a lot of work and they tend to run hot.

> [...] but it's kind of a lot of work and they tend to run hot.

Anyone that can open their computer to install an SSD, or a consumer-grade GPU, can install a data center GPU with a fan-kit; it's not rocket science.

There's probably still plenty of demand for that. At least someone in the executive team was floating around the idea of buying up some Nvidia cards to run AI models for the entire company somewhere locally. I don't think they'd be opposed to buying up data centre GPUs without fans if they suddenly flooded onto the market, even if that meant getting a rack chassis and a bunch of noisy server fans.

I've also seen someone sell their old fanless Nvidia cards on the local marketplace. There are definitely consumers running these things in their basements.

> but it's kind of a lot of work and they tend to run hot.

Most of the common used datacenter cards have people just 3d printing blower fan shroud attachments. Or using 3M/Gorilla Tape.

If a neocloud fails, it makes more sense to recapitalize it and leave the GPUs in place. If you sell the GPUs nobody will have enough power to run them.

If you sell the GPUs, they will get dispersed all over the world.

Wow wow wow hold on now, RAM and GPUs are only for the AI lords

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