AI research wiki
hardware · 2026-11-11 · Tier 1

Old GPUs reprice upward: CoreWeave Q3, Anthropic's cancellable Lambda deal, SoftBank's write-off, Semiconductor Week 45

Old GPUs reprice upward

TL;DR

  • CoreWeave Q3: revenue $3.66B (+168% YoY), net loss $709M, driven by $846M net interest expense against $379M adjusted operating income. Free cash burn $7.5B. Backlog $132.5B (from $104B in June). 2026 revenue guide $13-13.3B, capex $37-39B, about $4.12B cash against nearly $47B debt. The surprise: pricing for its older Ampere and Hopper GPUs rose 30-50% last quarter and now exceeds original contract rates, with new deals running past the chips' depreciable lives. About 300K GPUs come off contract through 2028.
  • Anthropic's amended S-1: about $10B of new cloud commitments with Microsoft and Google through 2033, and a $34.9B Lambda GPU lease that Anthropic may now cancel because Lambda missed its facility-lease deadline. Fees start only on delivery, so waiting costs nothing. Anthropic says it does not "currently intend" to exit.
  • SoftBank: a $3.7B write-off on non-refundable advance payments for datacenter equipment, inside a ~$7B fiscal Q2 net loss that included a 597B-yen charge on US datacenter power procurement. Its OpenAI stake was marked at $99.6B.
  • Google: three of four TPU systems now run on Arm-based Axion hosts, AMD is reserved for confidential computing (TPU 8tx), and TPU 8i doubles CPU hosts to a 2:1 TPU-to-CPU ratio, because agentic inference pushes more work onto CPUs.
  • Semiconductor Week 45: Q3 global semiconductor sales $517.7B; AMD data-center revenue nearly doubled in a record $13.4B quarter; Arm revenue a record $1.44B with data-center royalties doubling; GlobalFoundries $1.90B with a record 31.4% non-IFRS gross margin; Hua Hong near $1B with utilization over 100%; Micron reportedly paused a $4.5B Taiwan memory fab amid labor talks; Nexperia seeks $2B from Wingtech.

Relation to prior wiki

  • Contradicts the 11-08 GPU generation rent gap reading that H100s were sliding toward about $3.50/hr while GB300 held near $13. CoreWeave says older-generation pricing went up, not down. Both can be true if spot rents fall while long contracts reprice upward on scarcity; the 11-08 Looking Ahead bet (H100 below $3/hr on a public index by 2027-02-06) now has a direct counter-signal.
  • The 11-10 report that B200 rents rose 74% and today's Ampere/Hopper repricing point the same way: supply, not obsolescence, sets rent this quarter.
  • Updates compute economics.