Thread

Amazon seeks to offload $8B of Nvidia chips to investors

80 points · 92 comments · wslh

sourdecor · 1790953337 · focus · HN ↗
Chips are automatically a depreciating asset - is there a historical basis for understanding how that affects companies, and how that will affect GPU-centric companies?
1. dgellow · 1790954546 · focus · HN ↗
  There is no consensus on AI chips lifespan as far as I’m aware
  1. nradov · 1790955381 · focus · HN ↗
    There's a pretty broad consensus that useful lifespan is only a few years, certainly no more than 7 and probably less. As each new generation of chips becomes more energy efficient at some point it's no longer economically viable to continue operating the previous generation even if they're still functional.
    cayleyh · 1790956841 · focus · HN ↗
    And also just the flat hardware failure rate.
    Not a lot of public data about things like that at scale, but there are some things like the Meta Llama report that had ~ 9% annualized gpu failure rate while training Llama 3. Not 100% clear from the Meta report if those are dead hardware or just 'unhappy' because they just put them into the 'interruption caused by' bucket.
    Would be interested if anyone had better data on actual live failure rates of h100 or better class gpu that suck so much power.
    <a href="https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-of-models/" rel="nofollow">https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-o... <a href="https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/10/31/news-datacenter-gpus-may-have-an-astonishingly-short-lifespan-of-only-1-to-3-years/" rel="nofollow">https://www.trendforce.com/news/2024/10/31/news-datacenter-g...

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