HACKER Q&A
📣 givemeethekeys

What happens to all the hardware when data centers upgrade?


It seems like there will be a lot of hardware that gets discarded every couple of years as new, more powerful systems are made available.

AWS put out a video and article on how it recycles a large amount of its hardware, since it is built for maintainability and repairability.

How true is that? Does it apply to other datacenter operators as well?

What will happen to all the parallel compute cards that will get upgraded soon? They can't be reused as GPU's for gamers, can they?

  👤 elmerfud Accepted Answer ✓
It depends on what it is. A lot of these places don't own any of the hardware they just lease it. When the lease is up is when they cycle it out. Then it goes to resellers and often ends up on eBay or bulk sold to lower tier data centers. Depending on what it is maybe even shipped to other countries.
👤 everfrustrated
Generally large companies will have an existing vendor that they use to dispose their IT equipment through. They will shred parts like storage devices and anything that can reasonably be resold will be sold through various auction houses.

Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.

I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.

Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).

https://cloudninjas.com/

https://savemyserver.com/

https://unixsurplus.com/

👤 wmf
What will happen to all the parallel compute cards that will get upgraded soon? They can't be reused as GPU's for gamers, can they?

You're right; V100/A100/H100 "GPUs" do not have the hardware to display graphics and they generally require custom SXM motherboards. Most of them will sit on eBay for a while and then be scrapped when no one buys them.

👤 gethly
Most of this HW is at the end of its life. It's not about time but usage. And data centers use the HW to the limit.
👤 lyaocean
Most of it goes through ITAD channels: storage gets wiped or shredded, reusable gear gets resold, and the rest is recycled by weight. Accelerator cards usually get a second life with smaller clouds/labs, but older SXM generations fall off fast. The useful metric I wish providers published is split by class: reused vs recycled vs trashed.