Have fun selling 8000 individual CPUs on eBay, so handling, storage, shipping... and even if that is for free it would only be 1/4 of what they paid. Not too mention that flooding the marked will mean the pieces goes down.

13% eBay fees, around $5 to pack and ship it, not including your time. Around $8 net per chip, so, $60k less returns/losses, then taxes on that. It might be worth it for one of those large liquidation companies, but they usually charge companies to recycle their equipment or pay very little at auctions.

For the E5-2697 v4 that are in this server I see much higher prices even on Chinese e-waste resellers, about $45

But I don't think that there's enough demand on the market for 8000 of them

Maybe if you pair with those unstable "x79” Chinese desktop motherboards with server sockets and then sell them as package like "ATX motherboard with 18 cores CPU and 256 gb ECC RAM" maybe can find more customers

For the ram they're going to make much more, 5000 sticks of 64gb ECC DDR4 are still expensive

Edit: no, I accidentally saw the prices of unregistered ECC RAM. Registered ECC RAM is very cheap and super abundant as only servers use that. Corps aren't stupid and buy used memory for their expensive servers, so when a server is decommissioned, registered ECC RAM is dumped on ebay for pennies

I currently run 2 of these xeon CPUs in my server. When I specced it out I was looking at about $300/year of energy usage and that was running at like 50% capacity daily. The thing has half the cores disabled because I currently don't need that much compute and the only thing running on it daily is TrueNAS. It has ran multiple game servers and labs in the past few months and still doesn't use that much compute. Really just depends what you're doing with it.