> That's the default assumption but in the new GPU+Memory constrained age isn't true.

Is it an age or a temporary situation?

> Time on 4 year old H100 servers costs more now than when they were new (!!)

There are several confounding factors.

We’ve seen massive inflation since then. So some growth in cost was expected.

More importantly, the current Tech industry almost always starts by selling things at a loss. The increased cost could simply be the industry choosing to not subsidize that particular service anymore.

But also, I don’t think that’s a realistic comparison. Rented out GPUs are likely not a similar use profile as compute used for training LLMs. The latter is likely closer to the cryptocurrency GPUs that are running at full tilt 24/7.

And those things physically burn out.

I also feel that the GPU/NPU value does not lose money as fast anymore.

What I am wondering though is how long can you run such a system at basically full load without interruption before it starts to just physically degrade.

If I have a H100 and I let it run for 4 years at full throttle does it still have the same theoretical value as it had at the start or are the chips just burning out.

I think I remember that back when the cards used for crypto mining were sold en masse on ebay the advice was to stay away from them because they are more likely to fail?

Depreciating doesn't just mean it could depreciate in value relative to the performance of newer GPUs, but also that its lifespan is limited by reliability issues and failures.

That's just inflation (yeah, the global one) and demand at play.

Let's not mix up depreciation of real value vs USD price (which is arbitrary, plus government controlled)