Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted GPU rental data on X on X (the former Twitter) on Sept. 8 and tagged it directly at investors who think the AI chip boom is built on shaky accounting.
Short seller Jim Chanos saw it and fired back within hours.
The post touched on one of the most-watched debates in AI investing right now. Michael Burry has a short position in Nvidia. He thinks the companies buying Nvidia chips are booking profits they have not actually earned.
Huang’s Sept. 8 post was the latest round of his pushback against that view.
Burry doubts profits of companies buying Nvidia chips: why it matters
Burry called the 2008 housing crash. He disclosed a Nvidia short through Scion Asset Management earlier this year. His argument is that cloud companies are writing Nvidia GPUs off too slowly on their books, which inflates their annual profits, according to CNBC.
Google, Microsoft, and Oracle all estimate that their AI chips last about six years. Burry said two to three years is closer to the truth, given how quickly Nvidia ships new architectures. He estimated the cloud providers are understating their depreciation costs by around $176 billion between 2026 and 2028, Benzinga reported.
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Meta put some real numbers on this in early 2025. The company said extending the useful life of certain servers to 5.5 years cut its depreciation expense by about $2.9 billion that year.
Burry said Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are doing the same kind of accounting across far larger GPU fleets. He has been making this case publicly since late 2025. His firm has not given a public interview explaining the trade.
The depreciation argument is the clearest version of the Nvidia short that has surfaced from Burry’s filings and social media posts.
Huang posted rental prices for Nvidia chips: how Chanos responded
Huang shared a post from financial market platform Ornn Exchange on Sept. 8. Ornn reported that rental prices for Nvidia H100 chips jumped 22% in one month to $3.28 per hour. The H100 launched in 2022, so it’s three years old and more expensive to rent now than it was last month.
In an Aug. 13 post on X, Huang highlighted that CoreWeave signed a contract to rent Nvidia A100 GPUs through 2029. The A100 launched in May 2020. That is nine years of useful life on a chip that Burry’s model said should be economically done.
CoreWeave went public earlier this year. It has contracts covering nearly triple the GPU capacity it currently has online. Signing a nine-year deal on six-year-old hardware is the kind of data point Huang wanted investors to see.
“The mighty A100 fleet are mission-capable from 2020 through 2029,” Huang said in the Aug. 13 post. “NVIDIA compute is fungible, durable, and highly rentable. It is a productive, revenue-generating asset.”
Chanos replied to Huang’s Sept. 8 post. “Then why not rent them out yourself? Or simply keep raising prices?” Chanos wrote.
He later said his point was aimed at companies buying Nvidia chips to rent them out, not Nvidia itself. Chanos is short on data-center and neocloud companies. He has called the GPU rental business a commodity.
What the GPU market data show
CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator spoke about chip pricing on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. A batch of H100 GPUs that came off an expired contract was immediately rebooked at 95% of the original price.
“All of the data points that I’m getting are telling me that the infrastructure retains value,” Intrator told CNBC.
Silicon Data, which tracks GPU residual values, put the resale value of six-year-old A100 chips at around $5,000 as of September, Benzinga reported. The firm also said A100 pricing stopped falling in late 2025. H100 and B200 chips have more value in 2026 as rental rates have risen.
Chanos has previously warned of what he called a “depreciation time bomb” at companies such as CoreWeave and Oracle. He has argued that chips can become economically obsolete within three to four years, even while still running, according to Benzinga.
Where this stands right now
Burry is still short Nvidia. Chanos is still short neocloud and data center stocks. Huang is still posting chip rental data on X.
A100 chips from 2020 are renting through 2029. H100 chips from 2022 are up 22% in rental price in a month. Rebooked H100 contracts are coming in at 95% of the original rate.
Nvidia shares have pulled back from their 2024 highs but remain one of the most widely held stocks among institutional investors. The company has been backing large AI infrastructure deals and positioned its GPUs as long-lived financial assets, not just chips.
That framing is exactly what Burry and Chanos are pushing back against.
Burry was years early on the housing crash. He was right about the structure of that problem but wrong on the timing for a long time. He could be in the same position here.
Nvidia has not addressed his depreciation argument in detail beyond Huang’s X posts. The monthly GPU rental numbers are the closest thing to a live scorecard on this debate.
CoreWeave’s next earnings call and Nvidia’s own quarterly results will add more data points to a trade that both sides are watching closely.
Related: Jim Cramer has strong message for Nvidia, Broadcom investors
