The problem is that the hardware has a 5 or 6 year depreciation schedule on paper, but NVIDIA keeps saying that their next generation chip will be twice as good as their last chip so there is a FOMO schedule of like every two years.

that's the $84,000 question. They're filling datacenters with the fastest possible equipment and need it to be 10x faster, That hardware is dinosaur fodder a year after they install it.

I'm curious as well. My knowledge is probably quite outdated, but from what I understood the training part is what's expensive and then querying the model is pretty cheap. Is it still true (or was it ever) that the generated answers on search engines are cheaper to generate than the actual search results?