In case anyone confuses him with Linus Torvalds:

Have fun selling 8000 individual CPUs on eBay, so handling, storage, shipping... and even if that is for free it would only be 1/4 of what they paid. Not too mention that flooding the marked will mean the pieces goes down.

13% eBay fees, around $5 to pack and ship it, not including your time. Around $8 net per chip, so, $60k less returns/losses, then taxes on that. It might be worth it for one of those large liquidation companies, but they usually charge companies to recycle their equipment or pay very little at auctions.

For the E5-2697 v4 that are in this server I see much higher prices even on Chinese e-waste resellers, about $45

But I don't think that there's enough demand on the market for 8000 of them

Maybe if you pair with those unstable "x79” Chinese desktop motherboards with server sockets and then sell them as package like "ATX motherboard with 18 cores CPU and 256 gb ECC RAM" maybe can find more customers

For the ram they're going to make much more, 5000 sticks of 64gb ECC DDR4 are still expensive

Edit: no, I accidentally saw the prices of unregistered ECC RAM. Registered ECC RAM is very cheap and super abundant as only servers use that. Corps aren't stupid and buy used memory for their expensive servers, so when a server is decommissioned, registered ECC RAM is dumped on ebay for pennies

I currently run 2 of these xeon CPUs in my server. When I specced it out I was looking at about $300/year of energy usage and that was running at like 50% capacity daily. The thing has half the cores disabled because I currently don't need that much compute and the only thing running on it daily is TrueNAS. It has ran multiple game servers and labs in the past few months and still doesn't use that much compute. Really just depends what you're doing with it.

If that's too much, there's always the home brew option: https://www.zdnet.com/article/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-raspberry-pi-boards/

There are only tiny amounts of precious metals in there.

I mean there definitely are some valuable metals in there, but I can't imagine that this is a competitive price to pay for them, especially since extraction wouldn't be easy. And some parts do have value, even if it ends up being the case that running the full cluster isn't economic anymore.

I do wonder who at this point could use all those processors (and Mainboards), but the ram might still be reasonable to use, maybe the cables, the cabinets themselves too. And I think the video also mentions that there are two managing servers. Those might be most likely to actually be useful for their original purpose.

Didn't know they'd taken out the storage drives but I was aware despite my general ignorance that it's not turnkey ready to go. I guess what I'm wondering is, is there any part of the of the process involved in designing and building such a supercomputing cluster that is already taken care by buying it in the manner that it has been sold and could that in any way offset the increased costs of trying to bring such a cluster online rather than starting from scratch? I'm not saying it is the case, so much as wondering aloud for anyone with expertise to chime in, to see if that's a way it could make sense.

I understand there's a mountain to climb to bring this thing in to a usable state for anyone, but could it maybe get you to base camp more quickly?