Setting aside the unfolding tariff war drama and its impact on a large swaths of industries, including ITAD, a new generation of AI-capable laptops, desktops, workstations, and servers will hit the market this year, albeit at a slower pace than expected, promising to change what we know about computing devices. IT asset disposition (ITAD) professionals will also need to prepare for a wave of hardware unlike anything they’ve processed before. We looked at a number of new devices announced in March 2025, like the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Dell Pro Max with GB300, HP ZBook Fury G1i, and Lenovo’s AI-enhanced ThinkBook series, and we saw a significant leap in performance, architectural complexity and data-bearing potential. Within four to five years, these systems will begin entering decommissioning pipelines. And when they do, ITAD companies will need to rethink everything from teardown to resale strategy. A large part of the future problems that ITAD will experience will clearly come from lack of OEM and manufacturer attention, as evidence in points 1 through 3 below.
If you are a recycler or an ITAD processor, here are ten things we began to identify as game changers:
