How can you reuse outdated PC graphics cards? One researcher is turning them into purses. Theresa Barton, a research scientist at AI platform Databricks, is selling her creations at GPUPurse.com. But like some designer purses, they aren’t cheap; each one costs $1,024. The purses reuse an Nvidia GT730 graphics card model released in 2018, although the technology is even older, going back to 2014 when the GeForce 700 series first debuted. Re-used versions of the card can now be sold from between $12 to $25 online. Barton has been fitting the GPUs inside a rectangular shell built with a strap. Her site markets the creations as “for the GPU rich.” The attached cooling fan also still works and can spin.
(Credit: gpupurse.com)
In an email, Barton told PCMag: “The GPU purses are difficult to make because I ethically source them from data center dumpsters.”As for why she’s creating them, Barton said: “I can’t say exactly what motivated me to make the purses.” But it sounds like she’s fascinated with the sophisticated manufacturing process it takes to produce GPU chips.
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(Credit: gpupurse.com)
“The GPU chip fabrication process node is the most complex machine ever made by humans,” she wrote. “Extreme ultraviolet light exciting tin particles into a plasma that is hotter than lightning! Carving nanometer-sized circuits into silicon wafers that are 1 atom thick. And the final chip is not just expensive; it is beautiful because of the coherence of the retroreflected light waves.”According to her site, Barton only plans on making 10 GPU purses using the GT730. But it won’t be her last model. Her site is teasing the arrival of a handbag built out of an Nvidia H100, an enterprise-grade GPU being used across the tech industry to train new AI models. That one will go for a whopping $65,536, or about twice the cost of the GPU itself.
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About Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
I’ve been with PCMag since October 2017, covering a wide range of topics, including consumer electronics, cybersecurity, social media, networking, and gaming. Prior to working at PCMag, I was a foreign correspondent in Beijing for over five years, covering the tech scene in Asia.
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