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$60 million AI rack cluster listed on eBay, with 1.4 petabytes of memory and almost 10,000 Nvidia AI GPUs
Core 4 Solutions listed a 300-rack AI computing cluster on eBay for nearly $60 million, offering a glimpse of the enormous scale of hardware used for artificial intelligence. The listing ended on 28 October, but it is unclear whether anyone bought the equipment.
The racks contain 9,600 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 4,200 AMD EPYC CPUs, alongside 1.4 petabytes of memory. Each compute rack has four nodes with eight GPUs apiece, and US buyers could select free shipping. The A100 is an enterprise GPU designed for AI and data analysis, rather than gaming.
In short
- A 300-rack AI cluster was listed for $59.7 million.
- It includes 9,600 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 1.4 petabytes of memory.
- The listing ended, but a sale was not confirmed.
Explained simply
AI systems are trained and run on specialised computers that can process huge amounts of data in parallel. Graphics processing units, or GPUs, are especially useful for this work; Nvidia’s A100 is a business-focused model designed for AI and data analysis, rather than gaming.
Core 4 Solutions is offering a large collection of this equipment, including Nvidia GPUs, AMD processors and 1.4 petabytes of memory. A petabyte is a measure of digital storage, equal to about one million gigabytes.
The scale illustrates the infrastructure needed for some demanding AI and data tasks, which can require many machines working together. The equipment’s eventual buyer, if there is one, is unclear.