Hopefully the used storage would flood the market and drive down prices.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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I think thats wishful thinking. I don't think that most of what goes in a modern datacenter has much use outside of a datacenter.
Cheap datacenters for sale to the surviving AI companies. It's not like all things AI will disappear just because the bubble pops.
If companies can’t afford the data centers they’ll probably be sold off. An AI crash doesn’t mean LLMs and AI goes away. While the pricing model may not be working for many, the underlying tech is for many customers big and small. Models will have to get more efficient, but in line with Jevons Paradox, use will continue to grow. Maybe a pause in growth, but I don’t see a graveyard of data centers unless some major shift in regulation.
It'll be a golden age for repo men.
We could be men with ven
Cloud infra gonna get real cheap
An era of cheap used hardware? I would guess probably like whatever happened after the dotcom bubble in the late 90s.
Did the dotcom bubble result in billions of dollars of physical infrastructure in this way? Genuinely asking.
Yes, in ways that were actually greatly beneficial. Some companies were complete vaporware, but it proved a huge boom for fibre optic infrastructure and on the whole, building out modern telecom infrastructure. In a few short years, people went from dialup and T1 connections to DSL and high-speed cable. People weren't connected, and now they suddenly needed to be. It was an entirely new enterprise.
Unfortunately, these AI datacenters aren't really the same. They're not benefitting the public in a lasting sense. These are hot, they're loud, and they're expensive. The biggest benefits you may see from them after the bubble bursts is the infrastructure that was required to sustain them.
Improvements to sustainable, and cleaner energy sources are probably the biggest benefits. Reclaiming and rebuilding old nuclear plants, increased solar and wind projects. Governments that are willing to sell their constituents down a river for the business of a tech conglomerate won't benefit from this, but for the states that are now passing legislation to require these kinds companies to put their money into the communities they want to operate in may build lasting improvements.
It's a small silver lining, but it's there. That said, I can only imagine that when these companies see their business begin to get buried under the landslide of debt and reality that they will do everything in their power to escape liability for the waste of resources.
I don't know specifically, but there were thousands of startups that used computers, so when they went belly up one would assume they liquidated their assets. /edit: checking, yes according to google it did result in billions in liquidated or abandoned computer hardware.
What's probably gonna happen is a rapid buildout of infrastructure for cloud compute by reusing the datacenters for things like Windows 365 subscriptions.
There's gotta be a second ulterior motive besides AI behind these datacenters, and the fact that Win365 exists could be one such motive.
Make them detention camps for MAGA traitors and pedophiles.
A golden age for laser tag arenas
I would prefer a roller rink revival myself, but laser tag is fun too.
Ok hear me out: Roller laser tag!
grils! grils! there's plenty of floorspace for both!
Indoor airsoft/paintball too, provided it's purged of MAGA cosplayers
Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.
If anyone thinks I'm wrong, they're completely blind to what's going on and their future plan.
Survielllance centers for all the data being stolen off your smartphone and flock cameras.
Yes, and other sources. That's my theory as to why most of them are being built in the first place, regardless of AI.
I dont believe its a theory. Its absolute fact. Why else would they be requiring cameras in all cars next year, and putting flock cameras all over every city? That surveillance data needs to be stored and sorted through. This is the real reason for the massive push of data centers and bribery of politicians.
If anyone thinks I'm wrong, they're completely blind to what's going on and their future plan.
But the hallucination problem means that everyone will end up with a meaningless list of AI hallucinated "prior offenses" that could be used to arrest, detain and disappear literally anyone, based on mismatched unaudited surveillance footage of completely different people.
I'm thankful that no powerful persons today want a world where they can do that to anyone they find inconvenient.
It would be genuinely alarming if we had any total assholes out there with wealth or power or both.
What the LLMs can do reasonably well though is determine the political leanings of people's typed messages, so it can sort people into lists of potential dissidents based on their risk to the state, then they can have the human agents do the framing for arrest. The AI is probably terrible at doing that consistently too, but they don't have the personnel to do it by hand and the false positives still work to instill the fear of it.
you dropped this, /s
someone might mistake you for a brain damaged psych patient without it.
Mmhm very alarming. Good thing we are safe.
Apparently the US government is looking to give a massive bailout under the guise of "public partnership" so the public will pay for them and then corporations will get to use them and not pay us more than likely. They'll be put to use, we'll pay for them to take our jobs. It's really the best situation possible...
/Wrist
This is the most accurate assessment of the situation I have heard thus far.
2008 with hardware.
Hardware that dies in 5 years. At least the houses are still around assuming they didn't get wiped out with those fires
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.
One thing not mentioned here: Hardware has an expiration date. As hardware improves and becomes more performant, with reduced power consumption and heat generation, older hardware loses its value (I've got free servers and switches this way).
AI data centers have been built anticipating a demand that won't happen, therefore they are in a market already over saturated, dominated by few and just selling allocation won't let them cover costs if they are supposed to compete against the big 5.
I would say that in EU or few other countries where they care about data locality that could help, but chances are some providers won't get paid, some people will lose their jobs, and taxpayers will give a bailout to the wrong people.
It's actually l worse. The die shinks that help increase speed and density decrease durability. You can't run lightning between walls a few atoms thick forever.
Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I'm pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won't say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 "DIY SteamMachine" build myself).
As for the buildings, maybe we'll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it'll just be a mundane "AI datacenter becomes a generic data center".
I'd guess they'd be repurposed into business centers or office space like we've seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren't.
It's kinda hard to reuse datacenter hardware for home use. Many connectors are different, form factors too. Not to mention the noise, in servers noise is about the last priority.
Selfhosting enthusiasts will get great deals, but I doubt it will become mainstream.
If my gaming PC dose not sound like a jet taking off, I'm not satisfied.
the bigger problem is, that AI optimized GPUs have terrible gaming performance
My stupid Ai side project would be fast as fuck though.
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Do these datacenters even exist or are they just plans on paper?
My impression is we aren't axtually building anywhere near what these investors are investing in.
Will there even be anything to repurpose or scrap on the other side?
I am not so sure.
The one about 30 minutes from me most certainly exists. The one 15 minutes away they are building at this moment is just as real. The noise is ruining everything. The air is smoggy. It’s not just an interweb myth or something. These things are a blight on the places they appear in DC area for reference.
Oracle is building one of there several plans and even that one is gonna be years behind schedule. The rest are hardly more than a slab of concrete right now. So forget parting out computer hardware, they barely even have more than a couple of new buildings to sell off and so much debt that cannot possibly be paid because it depends on openAI suddenly having astronomical increases in revenue to even finish the existing plans.
Other players might be further ahead but I suspect the biggest gain for the gaming hardware market will simply be the cancelation of supposed contracts to buy up things like RAM and the drying up of money to buy AI-specific GPUs, forcing NV to actually care a tiny bit about the gaming segment again.
They are disposable. Meta is deploying them in tents. Elements of the infrastructure like power generation and heat management could be made durable, but I imagine that isn't a huge cost compared to replacing the entire guts of the thing every generation.
Meta knows. But they have to play the game.
Datacenters aren't only used for AI. They could be used for cloud gaming, or in general for hardware-as-a-service models as a capitalist solution to high hardware prices for consumers.
Or just good old server hosting.
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Indoor golf. Karts. Lazer tag.
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