I started a micro data center company and some of the most interested backers are some of the biggest dispensary owners in the country.
they know what they're sitting on.
Everyone is pricing AI infra by what's newest. I think the quiet trade right now is old matched with old.
Today Microsoft passed on renewing some older A100 capacity and the market acted like the chips died. Oracle came right back and said earlier gen GPU capacity that came up for renewal got renewed or resold at a 20% premium. The chip didn't die. It changed customers.
Same day I got sent a pair of enterprise data centers built around 2010. Primary and backup, raised floor, air cooled, generators. The kind of room every big company built before they moved to the cloud and then kind of forgot about.
The usual take is those rooms are useless for AI. For the newest racks, sure. Those want liquid cooling and way more power per rack than a 2010 room was ever designed for.
But an older GPU on air doesn't need any of that. It needs a floor that already has power and cooling, and a permit nobody is going to vote on again.
So you have old chips the hyperscalers are done with and old rooms the enterprises are done with. Both get priced like they're worthless. Put them together and you get inference capacity that skips the county meeting.
Not saying the math works on every one. But that's where I'm looking.
Wild. Little moments in time where you envisioned abundance was having a 1000 blue ray disk Library. Or flipping through your cd book with all the songs you could ever imagine. More than your dad ever could.
Or a desktop full of movies.
You could have it all.
Little did we know.