[themafia]

The government is going to use them.

The flock cameras are going to be fed into them.

The bitcoin network will be crashed.

A technological arms race just occurred in front of your eyes for the past 5 years and you think they're going to let the stockpile fall into civilian hands?

[dragontamer]

In 2 years the next generation chips will be released and th se chips will be obsolete.

That's truly e-waste. Now in practice, we programmers find uses of 10+ year old hardware as cheap webhosta, compiler/build boxes, Bamboo, unit tests, fuzzers and whatever. So as long as we can turn them on we programmers can and will find a use.

But because we are power constrained, when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released (and when those chips use 30% or less power), no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.

[themafia]

> will be obsolete.

In what sense? Not competitive for chat bot providers to use? Is that a metric that matters?

> when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released

What if they don't get released? You don't have a broad and competitive set of players providing products in this realm. How hard would it be to stop this?

> no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.

You have lived your life with ready access to cutting edge resources. You ever wonder how long that trend could _possibly_ last?

[dragontamer]

As in: the 1.5nm or 1.8nm GPUs will use less power and therefore can actually be plugged in.

We are power constrained. The GPUs of this generation can't even be plugged in yet because of these power constraints.

When power is a problem, getting lower power GPUs in is a priority. The 1.8nm and 1.5nm next generation is already in production, and will likely launch before these massive GPU stockpiles are used.

And then what? Why plug in last generations crap when the next generation is shipping?

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Todays GPUs have to actually launch and be deployed while they are useful. Otherwise they could fully be obsolete and lose significant value.

[zozbot234]

I assume even really out of date cards and racks will readily find some use, when the present-day alternative costs ~$100k for a single card. Just have to run them on a low-enough basis that power use is not a significant portion of the overall cost of ownership.