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Comment by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

None of them have any moat, OpenAI already lost the lead [1] and no one is "winning". It is just a race to the bottom as they burn through GPUs that won't even last that long.

[1] https://x.com/kenshii_ai/status/2046111873909891151/photo/2

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GPUs are lasting longer than foreseen, in fact old GPUs are more valuable now (making more money!) than they were three years ago when they were new.

Tokens will continue to increase in price until the supply meets the demand. That's going to take a while.

Are old datacenter GPUs making more money than they were before? Various sources point to GPUs dying quickly (in 2024, a Google engineer suggested 3 years maximum), and even if they don't, newer chips cause rapid depreciation of older ones.[1]

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav...

AWS is still offering g4dn instances that run on NVIDIA T4 GPUs, which were first released in 2018. My last employer is still running a bunch of otherwise discontinued g3 instances with 2015 era GPUs because it’s not worth validating the numeric codes on new GPUs. People (especially journalists) underestimate how long these cards are economically useful.

The sources are the sources. The reality is the reality.

If you try to track down the actual source for that Tom's Hardware link, it becomes pretty obvious that the claim is not credible. [0]

GPUs do not burn out in three years, H100 rentals are priced at the same level as two years ago, and are effectively sold out. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203986#46208221

[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-great-gpu-shortage...

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