Upcycled GPU Purses: From Gaming Rigs to Fashion Statements

Researcher Turns Old Nvidia GPUs Into Stylish (and Expensive) Purses

How can you reuse outdated PC graphics cards?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. 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. "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.

You can make the viral GPU purse for $40 | Digital Trends

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us? I never thought the best graphics cards would become a fashion statement, much less some of the worst, but here we are. Over the weekend, a website called GPU Purse went live with a listing for a discarded Nvidia GT 730 GPU -- a $20 used GPU -- that had been turned into a handbag. You'll just need to shell out $1,024 for the bag, which, according to the product page, fits a phone and comes complete with a long or short chain. One look at the website sets off alarm bells, especially for a product that's over $1,000, but it appears there's some legitimacy behind it. Financial Times reports that the GPU Purse is the brainchild of Tessa Barton, a New York Times alum and current pretraining engineer at Databricks. Barton reportedly set up a Shopify store in haste after a post on X (formerly Twitter) went viral last week with over 1.4 million impressions. Recommended Videos #NYFW FW24 @nvidia 🔋✨@tessybarton pic.twitter.com/JtEZgs7taV — Christina Farhat (@farhatchristina) September 4, 2024 Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming ReSpec Subscribe Check your inbox! Privacy Policy The GPU purse might be real, and it might be something that will actually show up at your doorstep if you're brave enough to place an order. It's just a complete rip-off. Barton explained to FT that the arbitrary price is two raised to the 10th power -- apparently due to the fact that exponents of two are important for neural networks. The shop also lists a purse made with Nvidia's H100, which comes in at $65,536 -- or two raised to the 16th power. That listing currently doesn't have any photos. Maybe you could frame the bag as some sort of limited-edition collector's item -- in the Shopify listing, Barton says they are a "limited edition. I am making like 10 more in the next few weeks." The bag is still in stock, for what it's worth, so it doesn't seem like Barton has reached "like 10 more" orders quite yet. Silly as it may seem for the price, apparently there's a market for this type of, as Barton calls it, "blazingly fast fashion." At expensive Silicon Valley parties, especially since the AI boom and Nvidia's massive rise in stock price, Barton says you will be looked down upon if you wear a high fashion brand. "If you wear the GPU bag, you will be approached ... I don't know how to explain how many men will talk to you," Barton said in an interview with the Financial Times. Maybe if you frequent these types of parties and have a little Nvidia stock to blow, the GPU purse makes sense. For everyone else, you can build your own with a $20 GT 730 and a , which looks shockingly similar to what Barton currently has listed for sale.