I want a supercomputer, but unfortunately people keep wanting money for them. Fortunately, AI companies are currently filling buildings with extremely expensive computers. So:
A data centre agrees today that when it replaces a particular batch of servers in, say, 2031, Voiceco will buy them for an
agreed depreciated price. We immediately sell futures on those machines to people who would quite like a supercomputer in 2031.
The data centre gets a guaranteed buyer for its elderly machinery. I get to reserve $100,000 worth of 2026 computing equipment for perhaps $5,000, on the understanding that by delivery day it will be hopelessly obsolete and still capable of doing an absolutely preposterous amount of computing.
We make no profit on the computers themselves. They are sold at cost.We make money when the truck arrives (or if the customer dies in the next 5 years) because it turns out that twelve retired AI servers cannot simply be placed under your desk beside the printer. Depending on the size of your foolishness, we sell and install the racks, switches, power distribution, wiring and cooling required to make your newly acquired supercomputer work without dimming the neighbourhood.
Small packages might run in a garage. Larger customers receive an engineer who looks at their electrical panel, looks at the manifest, and says things beginning with “Well.”
The contracts could specify either particular hardware or guaranteed minimum capabilities, so if your chosen machines die prematurely you receive an equivalent quantity of some other datacentre's technological embarrassment. Eventually the first generation of customers takes delivery. Across suburbia, garage doors rise. Fans spool up. Lights flicker.
And thousands of ordinary citizens finally possess the computational resources once available only to governments, universities and trillion-dollar corporations.
Mostly they will use them to run Minecraft servers.