AI infrastructure company Nebius is pushing back against the investor debate over neocloud economics by saying that older Nvidia chips are still gaining rental value. CNBC quotes an executive, Lochmiller, saying that A100 prices are higher today than in 2020 or 2021 and that H100 prices are higher than when the chips first deployed in 2023. The reason, the article says, is that advances in underlying models have made compute infrastructure more valuable.
The comments are central to a wider question: how quickly Nvidia GPUs lose economic value as newer chips are released. Neoclouds spend billions on GPUs and need to keep renting out older chips at attractive rates to recover those costs and become profitable. The article says Lochmiller's comments suggest that, at least for Crusoe, older Nvidia chips are commanding higher rental prices than at first deployment.
That evidence could strengthen the case for AI cloud providers, but the article presents it as one data point in a broader investor debate rather than a complete answer for the sector.