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.
#NYFW FW24 @nvidia 🔋✨@tessybarton pic.twitter.com/JtEZgs7taV
— Christina Farhat (@farhatchristina) September 4, 2024
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 $16 clear acrylic purse on Amazon , which looks shockingly similar to what Barton currently has listed for sale.
