“I remember back when people were very excited about Hopper H100s. They were like, okay, maybe it has a five-year useful life and you're renting it out at a buck 80, $2 per GPU hour. And that was four years ago. So the chip should be defunct now … not at all defunct. Not only that, it rents at a higher rate. It's $2.50 or $3. … An unintended consequence of AI being good at software is that the underlying asset life is getting longer, thereby helping it to be more financeable.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
The discussion was about how long GPUs really last, which decides whether the debt financing the buildout is safe. Volpi argued that older chips are earning more today than when they were new. His host pushed back that debt investors have not accepted the longer life.
Transcript
Oh, for sure. And not just any company, but 7 billion people have a supercomputer in their pocket. Exactly. So there's much more evenly spread consumption of the underlying benefit that's being produced.
…interest rates and the scale of capital causing people to say, hey, this is going to crowd out everything else and we may not even have enough capital. During the bandwidth build out and the internet build out, that was not the case, correct? There was no sudden increase in interest rates, was it?
…this asset that have a five-year life, partly because of AI itself, is a useful asset for quite a bit longer. And in that context, I mean, if you're in the business of financing an asset and that asset ends up having a much more longer useful life, then you're the beneficiary of that because your business models were constructed on a short. So in some sense, I actually think this, the fact an unintended consequence of AI being good at software is that the underlying asset life is getting longer, thereby helping it to be more financeable. And that's an interesting phenomenon that I didn't quite expect
when this thing got underway. Although the investors are not, the dead investors have not broadly accepted the extended life of a GPU. But your clouds clearly have to be.
I'm not sure I have either. I mean, like right now, it seems what's mostly happening is that we have a massive scarcity of an asset. So even previous generations
are still worth a lot, right? If we ever get to a point where we have an abundance of GPUs, that might completely change. You might go back to those numbers. So I think
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