>If a taxi company did that every year, they'd be losing a lot of money. Of course new cars and cards are cheaper to operate than old ones, but is that difference enough to offset buying a new one every one to three years?

That's where the analogy breaks. There are massive efficiency gains from new process nodes, which new GPUs use. Efficiency improvements for cars are glacial, aside from "breakthroughs" like hybrid/EV cars.

If there was a new taxi every other year that could handle twice as many fares, they might. That’s not how taxis work but that is how chips work.

>offset buying a new one every one to three years?

Isn't that precisely how leasing works? Also, don't companies prefer not to own hardware for tax purposes? I've worked for several places where they leased compute equipment with upgrades coming at the end of each lease.

Who wants to buy GPUs that were redlined for three years in a data center? Maybe there's a market for those, but most people already seem wary of lightly used GPUs from other consumers, let alone GPUs that were burning in a crypto farm or AI data center for years.

> Who wants to buy

who cares? that's the beauty of the lease. once it's over, the old and busted gets replaced with new and shiny. what the leasing company does is up to them. it becomes one of those YP not an MP situations with deprecated equipment.

The leasing company cares - the lease terms depend on the answer. That is why I can lease a car for 3 years for the same payment as a 6 year loan (more or less) - the lease company expects someone will want it. If there is no market for it after they will still lease it but the cost goes up

Depends on the price, of course. I'm wary of paying 50% of new for something run hard 3 years. Seems an NVIDIA H100 is going for $20k+ on EBay. I'm not taking that risk.

Depending on the discount, a lot of people.

That works either because someone wants to buy old hardware for the manufacturer/lessor, or because the hardware is EOL in 3 years but it's easier to let the lessor deal with recyling / valuable parts recovery.

If your competitor refreshes their cards and you dont, they will win on margin.

You kind of have to.

Not necessarily if you count capital costs vs operating costs/margins.

Replacing cars every 3 years vs a couple % in efficiency is not an obvious trade off. Especially if you can do it in 5 years instead of 3.

You can sell the old, less efficient GPUs to folks who will be running them with markedly lower duty cycles (so, less emphasis on direct operational costs), e.g. for on-prem inference or even just typical workstation/consumer use. It ends up being a win-win trade.

Then you’re dealing with a lot of labor to do the switches (and arrange sales of used equipment), plus capital float costs while you do it.

It can make sense at a certain scale, but it’s a non trivial amount of cost and effort for potentially marginal returns.

Building a new data center and getting power takes years to double your capacity. Swapping out out a rack that is twice as fast takes very little time in comparison.

Huh? What does your statements have to do with what I’m saying?

I’m just pointing out changing it out at 5 years is likely cheaper than at 3 years.

Depends at the rate of growth of the hardware. If your data center is full and fully booked, and hardware is doubling in speed every year it's cheaper to switch it out every couple of years.

So many goal posts being changed constantly?

You highlight the exact dilemma.

Company A has taxis that are 5 percent less efficient and for the reasons you stated doesn't want to upgrade.

Company B just bought new taxis, and they are undercutting company A by 5 percent while paying their drivers the same.

Company A is no longer competitive.

The debt company B took on to buy those new taxis means they're no longer competitive either if they undercut by 5%.

The scenario doesn't add up.

But Company A also took on debt for theirs, so that's a wash. You assume only one of them has debt to service?

Both companies bought a set of taxis in the past. Presumably at the same time if we want this comparison to be easy to understand.

If company A still has debt from that, company B has that much debt plus more debt from buying a new set of taxis.

Refreshing your equipment more often means that you're spending more per year on equipment. If you do it too often, then even if the new equipment is better you lose money overall.

If company B wants to undercut company A, their advantage from better equipment has to overcome the cost of switching.

You are assuming something again.

They both refresh their equipment at the same rate.

> They both refresh their equipment at the same rate.

I wish you'd said that upfront. Especially because the comment you replied to was talking about replacing at different rates.

So your version, if company A and B are refreshing at the same rate, then that means six months before B's refresh company A had the newer taxis. You implied they were charging similar amounts at that point, so company A was making bigger profits, and had been making bigger profits for a significant time. So when company B is able to cut prices 5%, company A can survive just fine. They don't need to rush into a premature upgrade that costs a ton of money, they can upgrade on their normal schedule.

TL;DR: six months ago company B was "no longer competitive" and they survived. The companies are taking turns having the best tech. It's fine.