With 250,000 highly-desired Nvidia graphics processors, CoreWeave has become one of the most prominent “GPU clouds,” a status it hopes investors will value when it debuts on the public markets.
But the world of artificial intelligence hardware is moving so quickly that it raises questions about how long those chips will remain on the cutting edge and in demand. It’s a concern that could impact investor demand for shares of CoreWeave, one of the most anticipated IPOs in years.
CoreWeave, which rents out remote access to computers based on Nvidia AI chips,said in a financial filing this monththat most of its AI chips are from Nvidia’s Hopper generation. Those chips, such as the H100, were state-of-the-art in 2023 and 2024. They were scarce as AI companies bought or rented all the chips they could get in the wake of OpenAI ushering in the generative AI age with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
But these days, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says that his company’s Hopper chips are getting blown out of the water by their successors – the Blackwell generation of GPUs, which have been shipping since late 2024. Hopper chips are “fine” for some circumstances but “not many,” Huang joked at Nvidia’s GTC conference last week.
“In a reasoning model, Blackwell is 40 times the performance of Hopper. Straight up. Pretty amazing,” Huang said. “I said before that when Blackwell starts shipping in volume, you couldn’t give Hoppers away.”
That’s great for Nvidia, which needs to find ways to keep selling chips to the companies committed to the AI race, but it’s bad news for GPU clouds like CoreWeave. That’s because the New Jersey company models the future trajectory of its business based on how much it anticipates being able to rent Nvidia chips out for over the next five to six years.
Huang may have been kidding, but Nvidia spent much of its event detailing just how much better its Blackwell chips are. In Nvidia’s view, the best way to decrease the high cost of serving AI is by buying faster chips.
Blackwell systems are in full production and shipping to customers, and Nvidia plans to introduce an upgraded version of Blackwell in late 2026. When new chips come out, the older chips — the kind CoreWeave has a quarter of a million of — go down in price, Huang said. So too does the price of renting them.
Older chips don’t just stop working when new ones come out. Most companies, including CoreWeave, plan to use Hopper chips for six years. But Nvidia is telling customers that its newer, faster chips are capable of producing more AI content, which leads to more revenues at a better margin for clouds.
An H100 would have to be priced 65% lower per hour than an Nvidia Blackwell GB200 NVL system for the two systems to be competitive in price per output to a renter. Put another way, the H100 would have to rent at 98 cents per hour to match the price per output of a Blackwell rack system priced at $2.20 per hour per GPU, SemiAnalysis estimated, speaking generally about AI rentals.
H100s rented for as much as $8 per hour back in 2023 and often required long commitments and lead times, but now, usage of those chips can be summoned in minutes with a credit card. Some services now offer rented H100 access for under $2 per hour.
The industry could be entering a period where the useful life of AI chips is reduced, Barclays analyst Ross Sandler wrote in a note on Friday. He was focused on hyperscalers — Meta, Google and Amazon — but the trend affects smaller cloud providers like CoreWeave, too.
“These assets are becoming obsolete at a much more rapid pace given how much innovation and speed improvements happen with each generation,” Sandler wrote.
This threatens company earnings if they end up depreciating older equipment faster, he said.
CoreWeave says that if there were to be changes to the “significant” assumptions it makes about the useful lifetime of its AI infrastructure, it could hurt its business or future prospects. CoreWeave has also borrowed nearly $8 billion to buy Nvidia chips and build its data centers, sometimes using the GPUs it amassed as collateral.
Analysts and investors are also increasingly asking questions about the useful lifespan of these new AI systems and whether their financial depreciation schedules should be accelerated because the technology is improving so fast.
CoreWeave says in its filing that it seeks to offer state-of-the-art infrastructure and says it will continue spending to expand and improve its data centers.
“Part of this process entails cycling out outdated components of our infrastructure and replacing them with the latest technology available,” the New Jersey company said. “This requires us to make certain estimates with respect to the useful life of the components of our infrastructure and to maximize the value of the components of our infrastructure, including our GPUs, to the fullest extent possible.”
CoreWeave and Nvidia maintain a good relationship. CoreWeave will certainly buy more chips from Nvidia, which owns more than 5% of the New Jersey company.
“We’re super proud of them,” Huang said last week.
But Nvidia’s road map for releasing new chips that it proudly touts will make their predecessors obsolete is a threat to CoreWeave’s ambitions.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook shake hands on the day they present Apple’s announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Apple shares rose 13% this week, its largest weekly gain in more than five years, after CEO Tim Cook appeared with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday.
Shares of the iPhone maker rose 4% to close at $229.35 per share on Friday for the company’s largest weekly gain since July 2020. The week’s move added over $400 billion to Apple’s market cap, which now sits at $3.4 trillion.
At the White House on Wednesday, Cook appeared with Trump to announce Apple’s plans to spend $100 billion on American companies and American parts over the next four years.
Apple’s plans to buy more American chips pleased Trump, who said during the public meeting that because the company was building in the U.S., it would be exempt from future tariffs that could double the price of imported chips.
Investors had worried that some of Trump’s tariffs could substantially hurt Apple’s profitability. Apple warned in July that it expected over $1 billion in tariff costs in the current quarter, assuming no changes.
“Apple and Tim Cook delivered a masterclass in managing uncertainty after months and months of overhang relative to the potential challenges the company could face from tariffs,” JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee wrote on Wednesday. He has an overweight rating on Apple’s stock.
Cook’s successful White House meeting also comes two weeks after Apple reported June quarter earnings in which overall revenue jumped 10% and iPhone sales grew by 13%.
In an aerial view, the Tesla headquarters is seen in Austin, Texas, on July 24, 2025.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Tesla has been granted a permit to run a ride-hailing business in Texas, allowing the electric vehicle maker to compete against companies including Uber and Lyft.
Tesla Robotaxi LLC is licensed to operate a “transportation network company” until August 6, 2026, according to a listing on the website of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, or TDLR. The permit was issued this week.
Elon Musk’s EV company has been running a limited ride-hailing service for invited riders in Austin since late June. The select few passengers have mostly been social media influencers and analysts, including many who generate income by posting Tesla fan content on platforms like X and YouTube.
The Austin fleet consists of Model Y vehicles equipped with Tesla’s latest partially automated driving systems. The company has been operating the cars with a valet, or human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat tasked with intervening if there are issues with the ride. The vehicles are also remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.
Musk, who has characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” said on Tesla’s earnings call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 with autonomous ride-hailing services.
The Texas permit is the first to enable Tesla to run a “transportation network company.” TDLR said Friday that this kind of permit lets Tesla operate a ride-hailing business anywhere in the state, including with “automated motor vehicles,” and doesn’t require Tesla to keep a human safety driver or valet on board.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
As CNBC previously reported, Tesla robotaxis were captured on camera disobeying traffic rules in and around Austin after the company started its pilot program. None of the known incidents have been reported as causing injury or serious property damage, though they have drawn federal scrutiny.
In one incident, Tesla content creator Joe Tegtmeyer reported that his robotaxi failed to stop for a train crossing signal and lowering gate-arm, requiring a Tesla employee on board to intervene. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has discussed this incident with Tesla, a spokesperson for the regulator told CNBC by email.
Texas has historically been more permissive of autonomous vehicle testing and operations on public roads than have other states.
A new law signed by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott goes into effect this year that will require AV makers to get approval from the state before starting driverless operations. The new law also gives the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles the authority to revoke permits if AV companies and their cars aren’t complying with safety standards.
Tesla’s AV efforts have faced a number of challenges across the country, including federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot and FSD (Full Self-Driving) systems.
A jury in a federal court in Miami last week determined that Tesla should hold 33% of the liability for a fatal Autopilot-involved collision.
And the California DMV has sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems. Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time. But Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”
Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In 2019, he said the company would put 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020, a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.
Those promises never materialized and, in the robotaxi market, Tesla lags way behind competitors like Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China.
Tesla shares are down 18% this year, by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.
Shares of The Trade Desk plummeted almost 40% on Friday and headed for their worst day on record after the ad-tech company announced the departure of its CFO and analysts expressed concerns about rising competition from Amazon.
The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, suffered its steepest prior drop in February, when the shares fell 33% on a revenue miss. In its second-quarter earnings report late Thursday, the company beat expectations on earnings and revenue, but the results failed to impress investors.
The Trade Desk, which specializes in providing technology to companies that want to target users across the web, said finance chief Laura Schenkein is leaving the job and being replaced by Alex Kayyal, who has been working as a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
While some analysts were uneasy about the sudden change in the top finance role, the bigger concern is Amazon’s growing role in the online ad market, as well as the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on ad spending.
Amazon has emerged as a significant player in the digital advertising market in recent years, and is now third behind Google and Meta. Last week, Amazon reported a 23% increase in ad revenue for the second quarter to $15.7 billion, which beat estimates.
Read more CNBC Amazon coverage
Amazon’s ad business has largely been tied to its own platforms, with brands paying up so they can get discovered on the sprawling marketplace. However, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), which allows brands to programmatically place ads across a wider swath of internet properties, is gaining more resonance in the market.
“Amazon is now unlocking access to traditionally exclusive ‘premium’ ad inventory across the open internet, validating the strength of its DSP and suggesting The Trade Desk’s value proposition could erode over time,” Wedbush analysts wrote on Friday.
The Wedbush analysts lowered their rating on The Trade Desk to the equivalent of hold from buy, and cited Amazon’s recent ad integration with Disney as a sign of the company’s aggressiveness.
Executives at The Trade Desk were asked about Amazon on the call, and responded by suggesting that the companies don’t really compete, emphasizing that Amazon is conflicted because it will always prioritize its own properties.
“A scaled independent DSP like The Trade Desk becomes essential as we help advertisers buy across everything and that we have to do that without conflict or compromise,” CEO Jeff Green said on the call. “It is my understanding that Amazon nearly doubled the supply of Prime Video inventory in the recent months. That creates a number of conflicts.”
For the second quarter, The Trade Desk reported a 19% increase in year-over-year revenue to $694 million, topping the $685 million estimate, according to analysts polled by LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents beat estimates by a penny.
Looking to the third quarter, the Trump administration’s tariffs were also a theme, as the company forecast revenue of at least $717 million, representing growth of 14% at minimum.
“From a macro standpoint, some of the world’s largest brands are absolutely facing pressure and some amount of uncertainty,” Green said. “Some have to respond more than others to tariffs. Many are managing inflation worries and the related pricing that comes with that.”
With Friday’s slump, The Trade Desk shares are now down 53% for the year, while the S&P 500 is up about 9%. The Trade Desk was added to the S&P 500 in June.