software can follow compute.. as gpus become cheaply available in the cloud, there's more and more pressure for software to take advantage of that

3 years - knowing nothing I think the chips will likely have a three year useful life. Maybe my intuition is it’s like buying graphics cards for a computer. It’s fast for a couple years.

Lots of variables, here. How long does the current AI boom continue? If it's a bust in two years, expect a much longer service life for those GPUs. If it's still going, the question's more interesting. Is it more expensive to build a new datacenter or replace the old GPUs? What about the cost of operating them? How much better are new GPUs?

If you have a truck full of A100s, it's "extremely valuable" but also perishable goods.

Right now, any workable AI hardware is valuable because the market is not presently saturated, and people are in a "buy what you can get" mindset.

Once the market is reasonably saturated, people will get more selective. Older parts will be less desirable-- less efficient, less featureful-- and if you have trucks full of them to dump on the market, it's going to depress the price.

It's like the PC market of 30 years ago. You got a new Pentium-100, but you could still sell on the old 386/16 for a fair amount of cash because for someone else, it beats "no computer". That market doesn't really exist anymore-- today, you may as well just leave a Haswell or Ryzen 1000 box at the curb unless you want to spend 6 weeks dealing with Craigslist flakes for $30.