The 5-Year Hardware Lifecycle Is Dead: Inside the New 18-Month GPU Refresh Cycle
The 5-year hardware lifecycle is dead for AI infrastructure. In traditional enterprise IT, 60 months was the gold standard for ROI. With GPU clusters, that has changed. Rapid innovation cycles — moving from H100s to Blackwell architectures — have compressed the refresh cycle to just 18–36 months. Performance isn’t the only factor. Power efficiency and…