A $35 garage mining rig is now a local 35-billion-parameter brain

The Story

A Reddit buyer paid about $35 (3,000 rubles) for a rusty nine-GPU Nvidia P106 mining farm found in a damp garage. All 54GB of VRAM worked. First test: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B locally at 30+ tokens/second. Electricity was free, which is load-bearing. Mining e-waste is being reborn as basement inference.

Why It Matters

The last cycle’s trash is this cycle’s household oracle. Local AI as dumpster-diving folklore.

Evidence

Tom’s Hardware, Oct 12; original Reddit

Sources

Daily scan: 2026-10-12

• tomshardware.comhttps://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/reddit-user-pays-usd35-for-a-crypto-mining-rig-left-in-a-garage-and-gets-54gb-of-vram-at-65-cents-per-gb-the-first-test-for-2017-era-gpus-a-35b-parameter-ai-model-running-locally-at-over-30-tokens-per-second