Do GPUs hold their value? Long life, volatile price.
A GPU from 2020 has revenue contracted into 2029, and NVIDIA says it still runs at full utilization. Its hourly rate is another story: an H100 hour fell roughly 80% from its 2023 peak before recovering.
What an H100 hour has cost.
Aug 2026$2.19/hrLowest tracked on-demand rate · Thunder Compute
H100 launched in 2022
Each bar is a separate quote, on its source's basis.
Three measures. Different meanings.
Purchase price, accounting life and rental rates answer different questions.
Acquisition
Your machine quote
Your agreed acquisition price is the starting cost.It does not establish a future resale price.
Useful life
5–6 years
Published accounting schedules · SiliconANGLE04
The cited owners report five- or six-year accounting lives. Those schedules allocate cost on their books.It is not a machine’s expiry date.
Rental hour
$1.09/hr
A100 · 6 years after launch · Lowest tracked A100 rate · Thunder Compute06 · August 13, 2026
The A100 observation is a published hourly rental floor, six calendar years after launch.It is not typical earnings or guaranteed demand.
The books say six years.
Depreciation schedules are audited and move earnings, so they are the closest thing to a public estimate of useful life. One owner went the other way.
- Microsoft6 yearsRaised from 4 years in Q4 FY2022
- Alphabet6 yearsNormalized to 6 years by 2023
- CoreWeave6 yearsNow has A100 revenue contracted past it
- Amazon5 yearsCut from 6 for a subset of servers, citing AI's pace
The case for, and against.
We sell these machines, so weigh the case for with that in mind. The strongest case against gets equal space.
They last.
Old cards still get long contracts.
“CoreWeave signed a contract for Nvidia A100 GPUs that runs into 2029, nine years after the Ampere SKU debuted.”
Mike Intrator, CoreWeave CEO, on the Q2 earnings call · Tom's Hardware01
Six-year-old silicon is still busy.
“Thanks to CUDA, the A100 GPUs we shipped six years ago are still running at full utilization today, powered by a vastly improved software stack.”
Colette Kress, NVIDIA CFO · NVIDIA / Rev03
Hardware off contract is rebooked at once.
“A batch of H100s coming off an expired contract was immediately rebooked at 95% of the original price.”
Software, not silicon, sets the retirement date.
“CUDA's compatibility and our massive installed base extend the life in our systems well beyond their original estimated useful life.”
Colette Kress, NVIDIA CFO · NVIDIA / Rev03
They don’t.
The long schedules may be accounting, not engineering.
“Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings.”
Michael Burry, who put the effect at $176 billion across hyperscalers between 2026 and 2028 · CNBC02
One hyperscaler shortened its schedule.
“An increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Amazon, in a February filing · SiliconANGLE04
The rental market flipped to oversupply.
“Don’t buy H100s. The market has flipped from shortage ($8/hr) to oversupplied ($2/hr) because of reserved compute resales, open model finetuning, and decline in new foundation model co’s.”
NVIDIA ships a new architecture roughly every year, faster than any of these schedules.
What our model assumes.
- Fall in hourly rates, every year
- 20%
- Floor, as a share of the starting rate
- 50%
Our payback model assumes rates fall every year until they reach the floor, and every payback figure on this site is computed after that decline. These are modeling assumptions, not forecasts, and not a promise about any machine.
Sources.
- CoreWeave signs A100 contracts into 2029, nine years after deploymentTom's Hardware, August 2026
- The question everyone in AI is asking: How long before a GPU depreciates?CNBC, November 14, 2025
- NVIDIA Q3 FY2026 earnings call transcriptNVIDIA / Rev, November 2025
- Resetting GPU depreciation: why AI factories bend, but don't break, useful life assumptionsSiliconANGLE, November 22, 2025
- From $8 to $1 per hour: GPU rental prices are crashingCybernews, February 24, 2025
- AI GPU Rental Market Trends (August 2026): Complete Industry AnalysisThunder Compute, August 13, 2026 · archived August 28, 2026
Rates and schedules move, so check the sources. Nothing here is investment advice.
Weighing it up?
Ask the people who build the machines the hard questions.
Next: Run the numbers yourself
