Nvidia CEO calls AI chips ‘highly rentable’ assets

Nvidia ↗ 0.90% CEO Jensen Huang is framing the company's AI chips not as depreciating hardware but as durable, income-producing infrastructure, pointing to rising rental prices for even its older GPUs as proof of concept.

"NVIDIA compute is fungible, durable and highly rentable. It is a productive, revenue-generating asset," Huang wrote on X on Sunday, responding to data from Ornn Exchange showing that hourly rental rates for the three-year-old H100 chip had climbed 22% over the past month to $3.28. The user who surfaced the data argued that traditional depreciation schedules would assume a chip that age should be losing value — yet the market is paying more for it instead.stocktwits+2

Compute as a Financeable Asset

Huang's comments build on a theme he has pushed for months. In August, Nvidia announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock ↗ 0.74%, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ↗ 2.07% and KKR to establish financing platforms designed to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure. The broader pitch: AI compute should be treated like a commodity that can be financed, contracted and priced — much like energy or real estate.x+1

GPU rental pricing data supports the narrative. SemiAnalysis reported in April that one-year H100 rental contract prices had risen roughly 40% from October 2025 to March 2026, and as of September, on-demand H100 rates span from about $1.49 per hour on discount marketplaces to nearly $11 per hour on hyperscaler platforms.newsletter.semianalysis+1

A Busy Week for Nvidia

Huang's rental-market commentary capped a stretch of headline-making activity. On September 3, Nvidia finalized a deal to acquire Hugging Face for roughly $12.9 billion, gaining control of an open-source AI platform hosting millions of models and datasets. The company is also reportedly in talks to invest about $2.5 billion in Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.bloomberg+2

Separately, Huang declared on X last Friday that "AGI has arrived" after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, which was trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72 systems. He added that 400,000 more GPUs are "coming online next."x

Nvidia shares closed at $230.36 on September 4, up more than 6.5% over three sessions, and rose about 1% in overnight trading heading into Tuesday.stocktwits+1