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I half expect Nvidia to have buyback contacts like Ferrari with the larger customers to prevent a price crash when they all upgrade and to keep them scarce. I
by tyfon 2mo ago
I half expect Nvidia to have buyback contacts like Ferrari with the larger customers to prevent a price crash when they all upgrade and to keep them scarce.
I hope not though, perhaps I can pick up a H100 in a few years if they get sold on the open market.
- someguyiguess 2mo agoThat should be illegal. Sounds like a very fraudulent business tactic.
- rcxdude 2mo agoFraudulent, I wouldn't say so. Anti-consumer or anti-competitive? Sounds like.
- 2III7 2mo ago[flagged]
- HPsquared 2mo agoGood old "win-win-lose"
- throw1234567891 2mo agoWould you call a trade-in a fraudulent tactic?
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoTrade-ins are voluntary.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- efficax 2mo agoso are buybacks. you choose to sign the contract. there's no way they didn't have an escape clause, although likely it meant not using the cloud provider anymore
- InsideOutSanta 2mo ago> so are buybacks. you choose to sign the contract Right, so they're not voluntary.
- anomaly_ 2mo agoLiterally what? Do you understand what is being proposed?
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoYes. "You choose to sign the contract" is not a reasonable argument, for two reasons: 1. There is one supplier, so you have no choice. 2. Even if you had a choice to sign the contract, this still means that it's not the same as a trade-in, because trade-ins are always voluntary, but once you have signed the contract, a right of first refusal is not. In general, the "you chose to sign the contract" argument is a poor justification for bad contracts. If the contract is bad, it is bad regardless of whether you chose to sign it.
- lmm 2mo agoTrade ins are fine. A contractual commitment to not buy hardware sounds like illegal restraint of trade.
- brookst 2mo agoHow? It’s a contract. Should I be allowed to pay a landscaper less if I agree to not do part of the work myself? I don’t understand the desire to tell totally anonymous third parties the terms under which they are allowed to deal with each other.
- lmm 2mo ago> It’s a contract Many kinds of contracts are illegal, including those that are anticompetitive in certain ways. > Should I be allowed to pay a landscaper less if I agree to not do part of the work myself? No?
- cyanydeez 2mo agoThe Grift Economy places all legalities on the marks and their inability to form legal fights.
- rbanffy 2mo agoIt’s common for car companies when they enter a new market. It removes uncertainty from the second hand market. By doing that, you know upfront what the value of your used hardware will be at the time you decommission it. It removes a lot of the risk for buyers in a volatile market.
- nl 2mo agoThe hyperscalers signing these contracts have decent legal departments. Think about Oracle for example - I'm pretty sure they know every trick there is about beneficial contract drafting. I don't think they need some special protection against this kind of contract.
- KaiserPro 2mo agoIts restrictive, but not that different from other types of deals. For example, when I worked at a VFX software company, we were exclusively with one hardware partner. This unlocked something like a 50% discount across all our infra needs (they were big enough to provide switches, racks, servers, storage) another company it unlocked a 75% discount.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> That should be illegal. Sounds like a very fraudulent business tactic. a) It's not fraudulent, and b) Nvidia has already signed on to buyback any unused capacity from the DCs it is selling to.
- zenbane 2mo agoit's also cruel. thankfully orgs like www.siliconstrays.com
- echelon 2mo agoWouldn't that be crazy - a hobbyist market for H100s? Maybe someone could start a business buying up and rehousing these.
- rtkwe 2mo agoThey're pretty specific to the datacenter use case with no outputs and they need to be cooled externally, principally through the very loud high speed fans used in data centers. I suppose you could strap a fan to one and put it in a normal case or maybe make a dedicated after market cooler (like the water blocks made for water cooling cases).
- bayindirh 2mo agoOr you can secure yourself a DLC one and try to feed it with the correct regime (liquid composition, temperature and flow rate). I'd say good luck. These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.
- jtolmar 2mo agoI think there's a market for a home AI server that can run an LLM or video gen model behind a web frontend. Not literally a raspberry pi strapped to an H100, but something with lopsided enough specs that people joke it is. And precisely because it's such a huge headache to do yourself, I think a small company could make a nice business wrapping up used datacenter cards in that sort of server.
- everforward 2mo agoI'm doubtful they can, based on current inference prices. An H100 draws about 50W while idling, which is ~$8/month at average US electricity prices. They also draw ~400W while active. The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models. Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.
- rickypp 2mo agoI worked at an org that had a substantial on-prem GPU datacenter. We transitioned to <Big Cloud Provider> with a substantial negotiated discount rate, with part of the contract being we would sell them all of our hardware and not purchase any more.
- throwaway85825 2mo agoHow does this work? Is the OEM giving the cloud provider a big discount or is the cloud provider giving you a teaser rate to lock up your business.
- wmf 2mo agoThe list price of cloud is 10x higher than the price of hardware itself so that leaves room for some discounting.
- to11mtm 2mo agoYeah.... Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often). In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...) And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view (and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...) An on-prem data center means: - You need to account for electricity costs - i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates. - cooling and power backup capability - Smaller factor but real - personnel cost - e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case. - whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs - Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware) - the cost of licensing whatever is running - In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.) - OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document. Still, IMO a lot of orgs don't do the right math around these decisions, or just buy into the 'Well trends can change' as though they can decide as an org they need to suddenly triple capacity in a month and it would be able to organically happen in the first place. Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.
- nylonstrung 2mo agoThere's going to be a golden age of GPGPU compute in the next few years once A100/H100 are fully obsolete for running frontier models efficiently and the price plummets It will be perfect for stuff like GPU-accelerated query engines, "classical ML" and every other CPU-based workload that could conceivably be offloaded to GPU
- throwaway894345 2mo agoGPGPU? General Purpose GPU? If embarrassingly parallel CPU algorithms weren't offloaded to the GPU previously, why would the A100/H100 price drop make a difference? We had cheap GPU in the past and we still left plenty of performance on the table with CPU programs because they were easier to build. Is the idea that previously maintaining GPU programs was expensive whereas now AI makes it cheap? If so, I could buy that line of reasoning. Maybe relatedly, I expect (hope) the hardware manufacturers will ramp up supply in the meanwhile which would also put downward pressure on GPUs. Right now though this hardware crunch is making me sad, not even because of GPUs but also because of general memory / disk.
- christina97 2mo agoGPGPU programming has become significantly easier now and the payoff is bigger (better hardware), due to the immense investment in this due to ML/AI.
- NuclearPM 2mo agoWhat are the best tools for this?
- girvo 2mo agoWe've not had cheap GPUs with this much VRAM before, though. Might be an interesting change, though I also doubt it personally.
- nl 2mo agoAs noted in my other comment you can get obsolete GPUs (P100s, BC250s) with lots of RAM on AliExpress now. It hasn't proven revolutionary.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- moffkalast 2mo agoThe only reason a datacenter would ditch their H100 is if it becomes uneconomical to run them, with newer silicon providing much more power efficiency. When that happens they'll look like a used V100 looks today: horribly inefficient, lacking modern data types and engines, requiring screaming server fans with weird adapters to not melt, way beyond end of life in terms of cuda support. Almost completely damn useless unless you really have no other alternative.
- mertleee 2mo ago[dead]
- imtringued 2mo agoHonestly, the primary reason you would ditch a H100 is because the ML models have moved onto a different data type, e.g. nobody uses fp8 anymore and everyone jumped onto fp4 or some custom block float thing.
- sidewndr46 2mo agoisn't Ferrari the brand that requires any purchaser to be an existing owner? I could see NVIDIA going for something like that.
- metadat 2mo agoInvite-only is only for special edition hypercars and halo models. Standard models can be purchased by anyone with the funds and desire.
- m463 2mo agotesla did that for the last 250 model s cars. https://electrek.co/2026/04/11/tesla-signature-series-model-s-x-final-run-pricing/ https://electrek.co/2026/04/11/tesla-signature-series-model-...
- driverdan 2mo agoPorsche is doing that for RS cars.
- olyjohn 2mo agoYeah and now they have lost 98% of their profits in the last year. How's that catering to the ultra-wealthy working out for them? They used to build attainable cars that were nearly as cheap as a Corvette. Now they're double the price, and most certainly aren't double the performance.
- rgmerk 2mo agoFrom what I’ve read the only part of their business that is holding up is the 911 and particularly the high-end variants. It’s everything else that’s struggling.