Re:xAI joins SpaceX
by vlovich123 on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @12:43AM
(#46866978)
Not really. GPUs are stateless so your bounded lifetime regardless of how much you use them is the lifetime of the shitties capacitor on there (essentially). Modulo a design defect or manufacturing defect, I’d expect a usable lifetime of at least 10 years, well beyond the manufacturer’s desire to support the drivers for it (ie the sw should “fail” first).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:xAI joins SpaceX
by mike_hearn on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @04:15AM
(#46868554)
The silicon itself does wear out. Dopant migration or something, I'm not an expert. Three years is probably too low but they do die. GPUs dying during training runs was a major engineering problem that had to be tackled to build LLMs.
> GPUs dying during training runs was a major engineering problem that had to be tackled to build LLMs.
The scale there is a little bit different. If you're training an LLM with 10,000 tightly-coupled GPUs where one failure could kill the entire job, then your mean time to failure drops by that factor of 10,000. What is a trivial risk in a single-GPU home setup would become a daily occurrence at that scale.