Conversation

While ruminating about the absurd cost of RAM and flash memory, both important for photography, and hearing about the AI datacenter sprawl, I am left pondering what the used equipment market is going to look like in 5-7 years. Memory is crazy expensive now because manufacturers are retooling to make memory for servers and AI processors, which are apparently being built at an unprecedented rate. If we set aside the reality that many of these data centers will never actually open and many of the servers will never make it out of their boxes, an extraordinary number have been/are being powered on. And they have a quite finite useful lifespan before they cost more in power than they can earn in revenue for those DC operators.

It occurs to me that there is a coming glut of used server class hardware like we’ve never seen before.