In-house hyperscaler stuff gets shredded, after every single piece of flash storage gets first drilled through and every hard drive gets bent by a hydraulic press. Then it goes into the usual e-waste recycling stream (ie. gets sent to poor countries where precious metals get extracted by people with a halved life expectancy).
Off-the-shelf enterprise gear has a chance to get a second life through remarketing channels, but much of it also gets shredded due to dumb corporate policies. There are stories of some companies refusing to offload a massive decom onto the second hand market as it would actually cause a crash. :)
Similar to corporate laptops where due to stupid policies, for most BigCos you can't really buy or otherwise get a used laptop, even as the former corporate used of said laptop.
I used (relatively) ancient servers (5-10 years in age) because their performance is completely adequate; they just use slightly more power. As a plus it's easy to buy spare parts, and they run on DDR3, so I'm not paying the current "RAM tax". I generally get such a server, max out its RAM, max out its CPUs and put it to work.
Same, the bang for buck on a 5yo server is insane. I got an old Dell a year ago (to replace our 15yo one that finally died) and it was $1200 AUD for a maxed out recently-retired server with 72TB of hard drives and something like 292GB of RAM.
The idle wattage per module has shrunk from 2.5-3W down to 1-1.2 between DDR3 & DDR5. Assuming a 1.3W difference (so 10.4W for 8760 hours), a DDR3 machine with 8 sticks would increase your yearly power consumption by almost 1% (assuming avg 10,500kWh/yr household)
That's only a couple dollars in most cases but the gap is only larger in every other instance. When I upgraded from Zen 2 to Zen 3 it was able to complete the same workload just as fast with half as many cores while pulling over 100W less. Sustained 100% utilization barely even heats a room effectively anymore!
The one thing to be careful with Zen 2 onwards is that if your server is going to be idling most of the time then the majority of your power usage comes from the IO die. Quite a few times you'd be better off with the "less efficient" Intel chips because they save 10-20 Watts when doing nothing.
A similar one I just ran into: my Framework Desktop was idling @ 5W more than other reported numbers. Issue turned out to be the 10 year old ATX PSU I was using.
To be clear, this server is very lightly loaded, it's just running our internal network services (file server, VPN/DNS, various web apps, SVN etc.) so it's not like we're flogging a room full of GeForce 1080Ti cards instead of buying a new 4090Ti or whatever. Also it's at work so it doesn't impact the home power bill. :D
Maybe? The price difference on newer hardware can buy a lot of electricity, and if you aren't running stuff at 100% all the time the calculation changes again. Idle power draw on a brand new server isn't significantly different from one that's 5 years old.
