This 2020 Nvidia chip is still going strong. That matters for the AI boom.

AI cloud company CoreWeave just offered fresh evidence in one of the biggest debates hanging over the AI boom: How long can AI chips stay useful and keep generating revenue?

The AI cloud company recently signed a contract to rent out Nvidia A100 GPUs well into 2029, CoreWeave Chief Financial Officer Nitin Agrawal told analysts late Tuesday. Nvidia introduced the A100 in 2020.

That means customers are committing to use these chips for running AI about nine years after their launch.

This matters because investors have been fiercely debating how quickly AI hardware loses its economic value. Critics and short sellers have argued that rapid advances from Nvidia could make older chips obsolete within two or three years. If that happened, companies spending billions of dollars on AI infrastructure might have to write down those investments much faster, hurting profits.

CoreWeave’s latest deal suggests the opposite may be happening.

“We recently signed an A100 contract that extends into 2029 at an attractive price,” Agrawal said. CoreWeave is also “largely sold out” of older generations of Nvidia chips, he added.

I first raised this depreciation risk before CoreWeave went public. Since then, evidence has increasingly suggested that useful GPU lives may be longer than feared. CoreWeave shares have surged since the initial public offering and jumped 20% on Wednesday.

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