Financial Times · TechnologyAug 13, 2026, 05:11 UTC+8

Wall Street giants bet Nvidia’s AI chips will defy the laws of finance

The FT reports that major Wall Street banks are assigning longer depreciation lives to Nvidia AI chips than to traditional servers. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan estimate useful lives of 6–7 years, versus 4–5 years for conventional hardware. The rationale: chips remain powerful enough to be repurposed for inference or leased after next-gen launches. This looks more like a financial assumption than a technical finding. The article does not include official comments from Nvidia or auditors on these schedules.

Why it matters: FT surfaces an overlooked financial signal: major banks are expressing optimism about Nvidia chip longevity through depreciation schedules. Has concrete numbers and named institutions, not vague commentary. Downside: the article doesn't have Nvidia or auditor confirmation — th...

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Take

This one's worth opening because it reframes AI hardware depreciation as a financial bet, not a technical finding. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are booking 6–7 year useful lives for Nvidia chips like H100s and B200s, versus the 4–5 years they'd assign to traditional server gear. The stated logic: even after next-gen chips ship, current cards stay powerful enough to handle inference workloads or get leased out, so they don't need to be written off as fast.

I'd discount this a bit. The FT piece is clear that these depreciation schedules come from the banks' own filings—no comment from Nvidia or their auditors. So this is an accounting assumption that makes earnings look better, not a measured physical lifespan. If chip cycles accelerate over the next two years, or if inference loads shift toward cheaper ASICs and custom silicon, those schedules get revised fast.

For anyone running AI infra, the practical signal is simpler: major buyers are now publicly betting on GPU resale value and inference reuse. If that bet holds, it matters for how you depreciate your own clusters and what the secondary market looks like. But without Nvidia's own data on long-term compatibility and performance degradation, I wouldn't read this as industry consensus yet.

Source: Financial Times · Technology · ft.com
Published: Aug 13, 2026, 05:11 UTC+8 · Aug 13, 2026