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Will server hardware get really cheap in a few years if some AI companies go under?
A few days ago, BreezeHost launched another FLASH SALE for their Mystery Box dedicated servers, with a wide range of datacenter locations to choose from. It makes me wonder if some company recently went bankrupt and sold off all their dedicated servers in bulk to BreezeHost, which is why they’re able to run this kind of Mystery Box promotion again.
From what I’ve seen, most people didn’t get particularly great specs, but I did come across someone who scored a dual Gold CPU + 192GB RAM + 8TB NVMe. Honestly, I’m pretty jealous—but I don’t really want to gamble on it. (That said, if OVH does Mystery Box for Easter next month, I’ll probably still give it a shot.)
I also can’t help but wonder—will DDR5 dedicated servers become significantly cheaper in a few years? Or will we see even more Mystery Box flash sales?
Comments
I don't believe AI companies will ever go bankrupt as mostly they are backed by NASDAQ, DOW and S&P members which are very stable.
Same as during Bitcoin craze somehow all the videocards were bought out and suddenly we have quite smart AI now, but still not much bulk videocards on the market compared to the shortage, meaning they were sent somewhere else and now are still used.
I might sound like a conspiracy theorist but I'm quite sure all of this is more related to Anduril and other overlords' endeavours similar to that (ie newer global positioning system which requires a lot of ram to keep the whole magnetic map of earth in the memory), just done via "special" channels. There was no profit at all in OpenAI grabbing 40% of consumer and server DDR5 memory market production (compared to GPUs it is extremely slow), and pretty sure a company on the brink and basically being "donation-ware" cannot secure such funds anyhow unless there's some very high level support.
AI companies rent the cards
Faulty, underclocked cards did flood the market. The rest aren't sold because it doesn't survive the mining environment.
Yep, I'm not arguing with that.
2012 (AlexNet Milestone): The breakout moment for deep learning was the realization that GPUs could train neural networks much faster than CPUs. AlexNet used two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs. This sparked an industry-wide realization that GPUs were essential for AI research.
Mid-2010s (AI Research Boom): As researchers rushed to train larger models, GPUs became the indispensable tool, fueling high-end GPU sales.
2016-2017 (Generative AI/LLM beginnings): Development of models requiring massive parallel processing continued to accelerate, making top-tier gaming cards (like the GTX 1080 Ti) highly sought after for both gaming and AI development.
Cue the 2017-2018 Crypto Spike which coincided with Gaming spike and release of 1080 chips - which are still not flooding the market. Why? They are useless for AI. Now pick any card which is good for AI? Won't be able to find it (prominent non-speculative crypto don't care about VRAM anymore and no one is buying 5000 gpus to thrash Vertcoin). But used AI munchers? Sure, plenty now, though very old and power hungry compared to current ones. 5090 was difficult to get on release not because of Crypto. 4090 same, and 3090 most likely too.