Post by @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works

@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works

2026-10-25 23:26 UTC

Was it? Not the point - this isn’t about secondhand servers, it’s about RAM being artificially scarce. Possibly as a deliberate measure to make cloud services sound less wasteful. If a 3090 with 32 GB was only a thousand bucks then OpenAI’s revenue would be even worse.

Replies (1)

@Orygin@sh.itjust.works 2026-10-26 00:00

I have an old server with lots of DDR4 which I can for the most part just plug into my PC. The CPU can be put into another motherboard, and the GPU are discrete cards. Most of that hardware can be re used by consumers. Most new AI datacentre deployment won’t be like that. An Nvidia Blackwell server has everything soldered. Good luck desoldering the CPU or GPU, the ram is either LPDDR5X which I never saw consumer motherboard use, the GPU is HBM3e and not a discrete card anymore. Whole package is unpractical for even a enthusiast to run. The original point was that once the AI bubble bursts, we’ll have hardware to use for local inference. My claim is that no, it’ll probably be too specialized. Unless some maniac in China figures out a way to make new consumer hardware for it, but they probably won’t since Nvidia hardware is technically illegal (both export and import at this point). Even then, I don’t see Nvidia or others go back to making consumer hardware at a level where we can do serious inference locally.

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