You can’t buy the gpus individually, and even if you can on a secondary market, you can’t use them without the baseboard, and you can’t use the baseboard without a compatible chassis, and a compatible chassis is full of CPUs, system memory etc. on top of that, you need a fabric. Even if you cheap out and go RoCE over IB it’s still 400gbs hcas, optics and switches
Yea, a node in a cluster costs as much as an American house. Maybe not on its own, but to make it useful for large scale training, even under the new math of deepseek, it costs as much as a house.