[gymbeaux]

I would imagine Anthropic et al. are largely leasing land/buildings, so as the other commenter said… must be the server racks that are acting as collateral (if anything). Generally enterprise hardware depreciates very harshly. I’m used to paying $10 for Intel Xeons that once retailed for over $5,000. I expect to pick up some NVIDIA Blackwell 6000s for $100 each someday.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yep, a friend recently told me that he remembers working somewhere that gave away old empty server racks - they were unnecessary, and expensive to store, so why keep them?

[blitzar]

We are in odd times however - I for one am sitting on paper profits on the consumer gpu I bought 2 years ago. If anyone goes down before the supply side is fixed - the first to fall will probably be able to liquidate their gpus at a profit.

[matwood]

> the first to fall will probably be able to liquidate their gpus at a profit

Meta and xAI announcing they are leasing out capacity is a version of this already happening.

[gymbeaux]

I just sold an RTX 3090 (released in 2020) for $1000. It should have been more like $200. I don’t see a point in running local LLMs with it but plenty of other people disagree, or want to “play around”. It’s so old that I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d be glad to have it- even if local LLMs ultimately catch up to the cloud frontier models (Opus, et al.). In a world where I can run Claude Opus 4.8 on an RTX 3090 at reasonable speeds, Anthropic doesn’t need even 1/20th the GPUs it has and it will dump them on the secondary market.