Comparing AI to the Saturn V is morally insulting. Sure, servers do have a lifespan. There's a science to the upgrade rate, and it was probably 5 years…back in the 90s. When tech was new, evolving fast and e-waste wasn't even a concept. Today, durability is measured in decades, which means provision is typically several decades.
There are many servers with chips from the last 20 years that could be spun today and would still work perfectly fine. They were furbished with proper cooling and engineered to last. In 2020 I worked in a data center where they still had a 1999 mainframe in production, purring away like a kitten and not a single bit less performant. It just received more network storage and new ram memory from time to time. This is not what is happening with AI chips. They are being planned to burn out and become useless out of heat degradation.
All based on the promise from NVIDIA of new chip's design breakthroughs that still don't exist for new models of LLMs that don't exist either. The problem is that, essentially, LLM tech has reached a pause in performance. More hardware, more data, more tokens, are not solving the problems that AI companies thought they would, and there's a development dead end where there's very few easy or simple improvements left to make.