CoreWeave: Are Data Centers Going the Way of the Mall?
CoreWeave just inked a $14-billion deal with Meta. But can it innovate faster than its data centers depreciate?
EXPERT OPINION BY DAVE SOKOLIN, TECHNOLOGY INVESTOR
Oct 1, 2025
GPUs can lose 20 to 30 percent of their value every year while chip innovation cycles accelerate. Just this week, Huawei announced a ramp-up of AI chip production on par with Nvidia, adding even more depreciation pressure. As The Financial Times‘ Bryce Elder wrote in March: “Six years in AI is an eternity. Nvidia’s server-grade V100 GPU cost around $10,000 in 2019 and can now be picked up for a few hundred dollars.”
This makes CoreWeave less of a durable infrastructure company and more of a speculative vehicle. The company raises money to build facilities, secure power, and buy chips. But if depreciation accelerates further, if new technologies like efficient photonic compute or cheap ASIC inference chips reduce the demand for large GPU clusters, or if the AI bubble pops and demand dissipates, the economics could collapse quickly.
CoreWeave: Are Data Centers Going the Way of the Mall?
That's going to make a harder sell for companies like OpenAI, Coreweave, and others to cash out profitably by selling the buildings to REITs. On the other hand, it's also often the case that a JV developing a property also involves a REIT which will take over management of the building. |
