this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 17 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I doubt it. Those AI computers are built in a really weird way and have a lot of hardware that isn't really useful outside an AI/HPC context. Some stuff like the weird card to card network topology can be reconfigured but the rest of it can't easily be. The servers are rather agressively designed around keeping as many GPUs fed as possible making them kinda weird for other jobs. Those datacenter cards are missing enough video hardware (for example texture units) to make gaming hard and I'm not sure there's that much consumer demand for linear algebra accelerators. If they can't find more HPC jobs they may go under. Movie studios could have interesting opportunities here but they are still primarily using CPUs in all their software IIRC.

The clusters in the UAE and Saudi Arabia might be repurposable for nuclear weapons research which isn't great.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

GPGPU usage is probally going to see some real usage. There was an interesting talk at the xorg conf even about turn the video hardware into virtual services running on GPGPU focused hardware.

Ive talked with some of the HPC programers too who are trying to find creative repurposes already lol

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I think that it's fair to say that AI is not the only application for that hardware, but I also think that carpelbridgesyndrome's point was that they aren't really well-suited to replace conventional servers, where all local computing just moves to a server, which is the sort of thing that ouRKaoS was worried about. Maybe for some very specialized use cases, like cloud gaming in some genres. I'd also add that the physical buildings have way more cooling capacity than is necessary for conventional servers, so they probably wouldn't be the most-cost-effective approach even if you replaced the computing hardware in the buildings.