Bengaluru developer bought old bank hardware for ₹3.5 Lakh. What it earns him now is stunning

A Bengaluru-based software developer has gone viral after a social media post claimed he built a lucrative AI business using decommissioned banking hardware bought at a government auction. The post alleges that an investment of ₹3.5 lakh in discarded enterprise equipment has now grown into a business earning around ₹27 lakh a month.

The story, shared by 100x Engineers, centres on Raj, a 27-year-old developer from Bengaluru, who reportedly bought a decommissioned server rack from a government bank hardware auction for ₹3.5 lakh.

Don't Miss: 'Why give a wrong picture of India?': Ex-Foreign Secretary counters Indra Nooyi's CEO remark

According to the post, the lot included enterprise-grade storage systems, dozens of high-capacity drives and networking hardware that had originally cost more than ₹1.5 crore.

 

 

Raj said he picked up a State Bank hardware lot at one of the government IT auctions held every quarter across India, where banks and enterprises offload unused equipment. He added that the storage shelves contained 75 terabytes of enterprise drives and a managed switch, hardware that originally sold for over ₹1.5 crore but was acquired for just ₹3.5 lakh.

Built an AI setup at home

Instead of leaving the hardware unused, Raj reportedly transformed it into an AI computing setup inside his one-bedroom apartment.

He expanded the system by adding two custom-built computers equipped with RTX 3090 graphics cards and 128GB of RAM each. According to the post, he then began running and fine-tuning open-source AI models, including Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen, for clients.

Raj said he used the setup to fine-tune Indic and English AI models for US clients on Hugging Face.

Claims to earn ₹27 lakh a month

The viral post claims Raj now earns around ₹27 lakh every month by helping US-based software companies customise AI models for their needs.

It also claims his electricity bill in Karnataka is about ₹8,000 a month, allowing him to avoid cloud computing costs and recover his entire investment in just four days.

The post ends by arguing that much of the infrastructure needed to compete in AI is already available in India through discarded enterprise hardware, suggesting the biggest barrier is finding people willing to buy and repurpose it.

The claims made in the viral post have not been independently verified.