alt Hacker NewsFrom what I've read, albeit from Reddit, they're not planning to sell or shelve those racks, they're planning to destroy them due to the fact it will flood the market. They have no intention of letting others have them.
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Aren't servers depreciating assets owned by the company and tracked on the balance sheet?
If so, on a liquidation event, I'd imagine they'd have to be sold to compensate the shareholders.
A company can either generate a small new revenue stream from on-selling old gear, or they can pay to destroy and dispose of it.
Which option is a profit-oriented, not-totally-profitable AI outfit going to choose?
Lots of precedent for that: In the EU WEEE has incentivized companies to crush working electronics rather than selling them, because it is way less bureaucracy to hand something to a certified recycler than it is to legally sell the stuff. And once something has been entered into the WEEE system as waste it's pretty much impossible to legally recover it: the recyclers are literally not allowed to simply pick working equipment out of the pile and sell it. Technically WEEE is supposed to enable reuse, but it's way easier and less bureaucracy to just crush stuff. The necessary per-item paperwork, testing and certification (it has to actually work, broken/non-working equipment cannot be removed from the WEEE system, because it is waste, legally) and logistics required for reuse exceed the residual value anyway.
That's why used enterprise/industrial electronics are way less common on EU eBay compared to other places, despite the industrial base being so large (or used to being so large). You can actually see when WEEE came into force because very little used T&M equipment entered circulation in the EU after the early 2000s.
Another factor is lease agreements, where companies don't buy equipment and the lessor "recycles" (i.e. crushes) the equipment to avoid creating a used/second hand market as an additional benefit.
The liquidators will squeeze every penny out. All that ram will hit someone who can take the chips out and repackage for consumers.
Huh. This is a crime against humanity. The planet is burning.
Who is "they"? Certainly we have some concentration of consumers of this hardware. Are you saying they'd rather destroy the hardware to protect their supplier's market rather than allow the secondary market to function as normal? Maybe this is written into contracts? We're in a very sad state of affairs if that's the case.