AI cloud service giant CoreWeave confirms that the A100 chip can be used until 2029, and the GPU life span far exceeds market expectations

IT House reported on August 13 that CoreWeave, an AI cloud service company, has just provided new evidence for a controversial question in the AI ​​craze: How long can AI chips maintain practical value and continue to generate revenue for enterprises? CoreWeave Chief Financial Officer Nitin Agrawal told analysts late Tuesday local time that the company recently signed a contract to lease Nvidia A100 GPUs until 2029. Nvidia launched the A100 in 2020. That means that some nine years after these chips hit the market, customers are still willing to rent them to run AI workloads. The reason this matters is because investors have been fiercely debating how quickly the economic value of AI hardware will decline. Critics and short sellers believe that Nvidia's rapid introduction of new generations of chips with higher performance may make older chips lose their value within two or three years. If that's the case, companies that have invested billions in building AI infrastructure may have to write down those investments more quickly, dragging down profits. But this latest contract signed by CoreWeave seems to indicate that the opposite may be true. “We recently signed an A100 contract extending the lease till 2029 at an attractive price,” Agrawal said. He also revealed that CoreWeave’s older-generation Nvidia chip resources have “basically been sold out.” Long before CoreWeave was launched, outsiders had raised the risk of rapid depreciation of AI chips. But since then, evidence has mounted that GPUs may actually last longer than the market feared. CoreWeave's share price has surged since its listing, and soared a further 20% on Wednesday local time. Data from the GPU rental market also backs up CoreWeave’s claims. Silicon Data, which tracks GPU prices, said that in