Datacenter rush will create ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, report says
the Guardian
Datacenter rush will create ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, report says
Global push will triple toxic e-waste annually in 25 years, filling enough shipping containers to circle globe six times
Electronics recycling really needs to be more mainstream. We’re burying way too much mineral content.
Yeah throwing out an entire computer because one little component is burnt out, or throwing out a whole component because one little connection is burnt out. And then there’s even micro soldering if you want to get surgical…
Or simply throwing a computer away because it’s slower than the new one. The price paid by the environment, by future generations, for e-waste needs to be front-loaded into the manufacturing process.
Otherwise companies are just stealing from the future and turning collective horizon into an unlivable garbage dump.
Its such a bummer because I would have went into electronic repair if I’d been born sooner. Right as I was thinking about it all the radioshacks were shutting down etc and everything became disposable and unfixable. Really sad because I enjoy fixing things. I just stick to old stuff now.
It sickens me how much has been thrown away just in the past 15 years, not to mention since the 50s…
Yeah and I feel like if we actually respected the nature and our fellow humans, made sure everything was mined as ethically as possible, everyone paid along the way got a living wage with self-determination, made to last, actual plans for disposal — all that. Then we’d actually cherish these devices like the amazing things that they are.
Sure we’d probably just be getting to the point of streaming video now, but I honestly don’t think we’d feel like we missed out.
The problem isn’t that it can’t be done, it’s that the manufacturing cost vs. labor cost in the US stops it from making economic sense. They do repair and reuse electronics in places like China (that’s where those modified GPUs with extra RAM and cheap desktop motherboards with old Xeon CPUs on them you find on EBay and Aliexpress come from, for example), but that’s because the technicians doing the work get paid a lot less than skilled people would be willing to accept here.
Also, much less labor law burden. No pesky ppe required while breathing toxic fumes!
I remember as a kid my mum getting angry that she had to buy a new vacuum cleaner with more non-replaceable plastic parts. She was used to being able to just get a guy to fix it. It’s sad that that’s just everything now - even cars.
But you know one day in our cyber punk future, you’ll be able to fish rig parts out of the dump like ya did for the ol’ beater your dad kept around.
Our dumps will be goldmines for whatever species takes the helm after we’re gone.
I’ve recently signed up for Ridwell and while I absolutely love it (they recycle electronics by the way, at least in Los Angeles) I hate that I have to pay a private company to recycle things.
And then prices will come back down!
…the prices are coming back down, right?
*Anakin smirk*
One of the good things that could come from this is the flood of cheap used hard drives and RAM which will hopefully drop used prices back down…beyond that everything else about this just sucks.
Those cheap drives will have been run really hard, though. I don’t know how much I’d trust them with anything important.
We’ll all be running RAID, buying 18TBs by the dozen
Pretty much what I was thinking except at the 24-26TB level lol 😎
Same but like 3-4TB 🥸
Same but 4G
True it depends largely on the manufacturer of the drives but yah agreed, likely to be used harder than your typical large scale vps/web server hosting company but, still, its gotta help the pricing market some because its just bonkers expensive now for used drives.
The whole point of this ai thing is so they can make it impossible to have a computer you own in your house. theyre probably just going to shred everything
That is certainly possible, but at the other end is the argument that these corps are greedy as all hell so they will likely try to profit reselling the used hardware as well given the current market for it.
If their plan doesn’t work they’re going to crash the economy so hard that RAM and storage will be the last thing on anyone’s mind. This is why they think they’re invincible.
If they thought they were invincible, they wouldn’t be building bunkers and prepping.
Ohh so true…my comment applies to the status quo so yah…if we go into an extended recession then yah…
The ram will all be server ram sadly, which is great for us homelab people, but sadly doesn’t solve the gonna consumer ram problem.
Maybe everyone just makes a huge homelab now with all that ram and we all just stream our games instead of worrying about a beefy pc lol
If there is a glut of ram that can only be used in specific machines then someone will find a way to modify systems to use it. Or I can see a company buying up huge stores of it and release consumer products that use it.
and if the server market is flooded with cheap used ram it will be less profitable for ram manufacturers to make more server ram, so they will shift to making more consumer ram. the exact opposite thing crucial just did.
Server RAM isn’t much different from PC ram - same slot, etc.
Probably has less RGB. If it’s used in storage it’s probably ECC? It’ll work in your PC though. Not everyone needs 8kMT/sec
It’s a different standard, different pinout, look up HBM
Mechanically and electrically incompatible
Probably there will be some kid smelting chips in some third world country for some pennies in exchange of lung cancer, and some other resoldering them on AliExpress cards
Not all data center memory is HBM, there’s still plenty of standard DDR4 (ECC) & DRR5 used in production as it’s easier and cheaper to replace if it fails. Although, you are correct that a lot of it is HBM.
I look forward to having Grace Hopper chips remanufactured onto ATX boards in half a decade or so, but it’s still cold comfort that we can’t have affordable hardware today.
Most consumer boards don’t support ECC or registered memroy. If you’re lucky yours will, but I wouldn’t count on it at all.
Lots of AMD boards do, actually.
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. All that bitcoin mining stuff, completely used up and mostly worthless at this point, and by the time the next (or two generations) comes out, so much of the old serve stuff is expensive to run, and then unsupported. I think re-use is great, but at a point real recycling needs to be the better option.
I just saw a video yesterday on hacking old bitcoin mining GPUs to unlock their RAM and PCI bandwidth and whatnot for general-purpose use. Desperation is the mother of invention, after all.
Yah fully embedded hardware that isn’t user serviceable will be junk and I agree recycling needs to be an option, but sadly we aren’t at the price point where it’ll be economical for companies to do so. Prices need to escalate significantly from these levels to do so otherwise we would be seeing it happen already.
If they even put them back on the market instead of having them destroyed in case they had something stored that could cause them to be sued.
An insane waste of valuable metals if it isn’t recycled.
Woohoo! Send it all to my address please!
You really don’t want it. At least most of it. I get discarded stuff from work quite frequently and 95% of it is way too loud, way too hot, and uses a boat-load of power. And I don’t mean like sitting next to a running house fan loud. I mean sitting next to a jet engine loud. Like if you are in a data center behind this equipment, you struggle to have a conversation with a guy a foot from you.
But if you got a nice cool basement and you never have to pay for power, you can get lots of good stuff relatively cheap.
I think we are okay making that mistake ourselves.
I mean that’s true. I probably would too. Well for about a week and then my wife would tell me to get rid of it.
You get a week? I had to get rid of it same day 😔
Just give me RAM and SSDs.
I guess those will also be mostly proprietary and unusable :-(
Nah, the RAM will be ECC, but AMD motherboards often will take that. SSDs will be m2 or SAS, you may have to find yourself a PCIE card to hook up those, but it shouldn’t be impossible.
Or Dell Precision Workstations. The SSDs would likely be SAS but maybe U2 or E1.S. Those would be harder to use but not impossible. I saw a QNAP that takes E1.S just yesterday. Of course the 5 bay without drives was $1k.
Nah that surprisingly is some of the most useful stuff. I have a machine upstairs with 512gb of ECC DDR4 from just that sorta situation.
If it exists, then there is an adapter.
This is how you end up with a homelab, it just takes one managed switch or a blade server amd now youre on ebay everyday looking for deals and struggling to pay electric bills.
True dat.
Anything useful will be smashed before they go into the dumpsters. There will be plenty of slightly discounted “refurbished” SSDs that will fail after a day though.
Metals can be recovered and recycle from smashed technology
Sure but do you know what’s going to happen to scrap metal prices when the bubble bursts? Good luck making a penny on a dump truck full of SSDs, especially when diesel will be $20/gallon. Maybe a river barge full will be worth the trouble.
Sell your copper soon folks.
Discarded electronics unusable by consumers.
Pretty much, or hardware that’s so expensive to run because of electricity that newer stuff makes sense. That’s always been the case, like ohh I can get cheap server hardware, until I look at my power bill.
I will be scooping up GPUs by the bucketful when the time comes
They would rather crush the GPUs than let us have them
As I said above, most of this stuff is not useful to home labbers.
I mean if you could get something like a H200 NVL (this is the normal pcie version) that would be useful. But most of these datacenters are using something like an H200 SXM5 module which only works in HGX/DGX GPU baseboards.
Chinese sellers on ebay have been making sxm2 mezzanines that use standard slimsas connections for a while. They even go up to sxm4-5. I have dual nvlinked v100s with their giant 4u tower coolers, some arctic 92mm fans and PTM for the TIM and they never break 70c under load for my personal use.
They definitely aren’t the flashiest, but local LLMs have come a long way in a short time to the point where they are quite nice to work with.
I didn’t know any of this. Great … now I have another rabbit hole to go down! 🤣
Seriously though, thanks for that. I’ll go check it out.
It’s quite a ride lol. There’s a group of people on the level1techs forum trying to get mi250x OAM units working on similar hardware.
I made a post about my own lab earlier this year too: lemmy.world/post/47291115
i did not need to see any of this… 😳
This looks amazing.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I expect a bridge by the time we’ve finished… Uh… Cleaning the guillotine.
Or maybe we make the guillotine out of the equipment. That would be fitting.
There’s gold in them there hills.
Buying used hardware for homelabs right here! Accepting offers