I'm curious what the actual rate of replacement/useful life of these GPUs running AI inference 24/7 is.

If these cards burn out in less than the ~5 years of depreciation that accounting puts them at, well then there will be problems.

Quite a lot better than people originally thought. There is a LOT of demand for 5+ year old Ampere on the secondary market, and hyperscalers are still holding on to many of them since they can’t acquire new compute fast enough.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/08/24/making-old-gpus-new-ag...