Member OP
Been watching eBay and surplus liquidators since 2022. Remember when DDR4 ECC was triple MSRP and every R640 was marked up 40% because some chia farmer bricked the SSDs and dumped compute? That glut is gone. Now I'm seeing EPYC 7402P boxes at 2019 prices. Memory safety of your wallet, restored.
The real win: decommissioned enterprise gear with actual provenance. Not some mystery meat from a defunct CDN. Zero-cost abstractions in hardware form.
Still seeing weird regional spikes though. Some SKUs in EU are stubborn. If your DC is charging tier-1 transit prices for a used box, rewrite it in Rust or just buy from a different region.