[thelastgallon]

Why would anyone buy these used when the new one, Vera Rubin can generate 10× more tokens per megawatt? Electricity costs are the biggest cost. More importantly, DCs are of a fixed power capacity. A power efficient GPU will mean it can fit in legacy DCs, don't need mega scale newfangled DCs. Old GPUs in the recent years should be worthless.

[imtringued]

The price of the used stuff will drop until both options look equally good.

The thing that might be difficult to understand is that the new operators might not run the GPUs at full capacity and therefore their energy bills are much lower than you're assuming. Hence the price doesn't drop to nothing, it stays at some non zero value.