With the expansion of AI, every bit of available computing power is being utilized, and even NVIDIA's six-year-old A100 "Ampere" accelerator is being fully utilized at CoreWeave. According to CoreWeave, and confirmed by NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang, the company has signed an agreement with a customer to rent chips released more than half a decade ago for several more years, specifically through 2029. This demonstrates that NVIDIA's platforms remain in high demand, with chips released in 2020 expected to have a usable lifespan extending nearly to the end of the decade. CoreWeave customers have rented these chips through 2029 for AI training and inference. In late 2020, NVIDIA introduced a GA100 GPU SKU for the A100, featuring 6,912 CUDA cores and up to 80 GB of HBM2E memory. By today's standards, the core count may not match modern solutions, but in an era where memory shortages affect everyone, even older HBM2E is acceptable when there is 80 GB of it per card.
Despite the later-introduced "Hopper," "Blackwell," and modern "Rubin" generations offering significant, multifold improvements in efficiency, performance, and memory capacity, every available computing resource is currently being utilized. CoreWeave confirmed that a customer is renting this six-year-old GPU through 2029, indicating that it still holds value for someone. This GPU likely costs much less to access per hour than modern solutions, but it probably performs well enough that customers are still willing to pay for it. On his social media feed, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang posted the following message.