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So much this.

The current-gen hardware is expected to have only 2-3 years of useful life. New tech, and especially new architecture is going to make inference much faster and more efficient in the near future, and the big vendors are going to be more limited by datacenter floor space and power/cooling, so that the hardware will be replaced very quickly by better models.

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For the time being this thesis hasn’t worked out though. H100’s are only going up in price and becoming more scarce [1]. At what point would you update if now going on 3 years into H100 lifecycle this doesn’t seem close to happen.

But they are becoming more scarce while staying on Nvidia’s shelves buy-and-hold, or being leased back in some cases. They are not being installed by customers at anything like the rate the sales figures suggest. So yeah, these H100s will last a long time in the packaging.

Meanwhile, Meta is selling their spare AI data centre capacity.

Isn’t that what SpaceX is doing too? Selling spare compute while they work on their rocket side hustle.

Look at DeepSeek! They have done full system optimization on their model, architecting it so that it would be cheap to serve. I am proud to call DeepSeek a world class tech engineering firm in a way that 99% of the tech world is not. They are a 1% company.

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