More and more mainstream analysts are identifying the coming AI crash, which is a good indication that it will happen soon.

So, what happens to all the data centers? They are already built but probably very expensive to maintain. Will many of them just be abandoned? Bought up by cloud computing companies? Scammers? Crypto miners? Can they be parted out and sold off piecemeal?

Will they be put to some productive use, or just become massive e-waste sites left to the locals to deal with?

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    12·
    6 hours ago

    In past crypto busts, Nvidia bought used datacenter GPUs and threw them away, to keep prices of new cards high.

    They will undoubtedly do this again. Probably AMD/Intel too.

    And “FOMO” style crypto mining sites were just abandoned or repurposed AFAIK.

    But honestly, I don’t know what will happen now. Especially to the “quick and dirty” sites like Meta’s server tents, all the supposedly temporary evaporative cooling/gas generators and such.

    Used server GPUs are still pretty good processors for all sorts of things. I would guess that Nvidia pivots towards robotics and“business virtual reality,” kinda like they’re already pivoting towards more utilitarian LLMs with the Nemotron releases, so maybe the surviving GPUs will get used for that.