Wall Street may be obsessing over Nvidia Corp's (NASDAQ: NVDA) next-generation Blackwell chips, but the company's partner, CoreWeave, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWV), just hinted that an overlooked trade could be older GPUs.

Older-generation Nvidia GPUs - including Hopper and Ampere systems - are "going up across the board," CoreWeave co-founder Brannin McBee said at a J.P. Morgan TMC Conference this week.

AI customers increasingly choose chips based on workload economics rather than simply chasing the newest hardware, he explained.

That's an unusual dynamic in semiconductors, where aging chips typically lose value rapidly as newer generations arrive.

Instead, CoreWeave suggested the AI market is beginning to resemble infrastructure finance more than traditional hardware cycles.

Older Nvidia GPUs Still Printing Money

McBee pointed to older Tesla and Volta GPUs from the late 2010s that continue operating profitably across cloud environments despite being well beyond standard depreciation timelines.

"They're not running for free and for fun. They're running because they're profitable," he said.

CoreWeave added that the industry-standard six-year depreciation life for GPUs "might end up being conservative," implying that AI compute assets may remain economically valuable far longer than investors initially expected.

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