Refresh Cycles Are Compressing — and That’s Money on the Floor
When AI-driven refresh shrinks hardware lifecycles from five years to 18–36 months, the gear leaving the data center is younger, denser, and worth more than retired equipment used to be. Meanwhile new-hardware lead times have stretched past a year while refurbished units ship in a week or two — so ‘old’ equipment has a live, hungry secondary market. The mistake is letting it sit in a closet depreciating instead of recovering it while demand is hot.
Coverage of data-center decommissioning notes AI-optimized architectures are compressing refresh intervals from 3–5 years to 18–36 months, producing large volumes of still-valuable servers, storage, and GPUs. First-wave deployments from 2022–2023 are reaching three-year depreciation in 2025–2026. Secondary-market residual value remains meaningful as mid-market and research buyers seek capacity; in early 2026, lead times for new high-capacity drives reached roughly 104 weeks and new servers about 26 weeks, while refurbished units shipped in one to two weeks.
Source: Industry Coverage