Are they? These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers. One example, not sure if cited by Zitron, or others, is that they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books. There have been trillions of debt discovered this way. Another issue is the apparently relentless progress of the hardware industry, needed to justify their super-high P/E ratios, measured against the fact, that to lessen the effect of HW amortization, hyperscalers opted to lengthen the depreciation timelines of their GPUs. So there is an apparent contradiction that new hardware needs to be both substantially better, and substantially the same, to make both stories true. I'm not a finance guy, and a lot of it is over my head, but even finance people keep asking the 'who's gonna pay for this' question. We're way past the belief that this is going to produce reasonable returns (as in a value for money kind of way), and hoping we can financially engineer ourselves out of this situation without having to feel the pain.

> These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers... they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books.

This is about as far from "tweaking their numbers" as you can get. It's a standard way infrastructure-heavy industries structure their investments and people would be asking questions if they didn't do this!

> hyperscalers opted to lengthen the depreciation timelines of their GPUs.

Yes and so they should! GPU depreciation timelines used to be 3 years!!

Google is famously still running 10 year old TPUs at 100% utilization, and 10 year old H100s are worth more now on the second hand market than they were when they were bought.

H100 spot prices have only dropped from $5 in May 24 to $3.20 now despite the release of the B200: https://semianalysis.com/gpu-pricing-index/

There are no ten year old H100s. The first production shipments happened exactly four years ago.

I'm pretty sure your claim about TPUs is similarly exaggerated, only a v1 (barely) qualifies and would have no utility today.

You are absolutely right, I apologize.

I think I was talking about A100 prices (which are still only 6 years old) and conflated a few different things there.

But A100 rental prices have climbed since 2024 (as far back as free account records show on https://semianalysis.com/gpu-pricing-index/).

Coreweave has announced they will keep A100s in use until 2029 which will be 9 years old then. I think that is where I got the 10yo number I had in my head.

On TPUs, I was also wrong on that, but less so. The quote is:

"seven and eight-year-old TPUs have 100 percent utilization."[1]

That was last year, so 8 or 9 year old TPUs now (assuming it is still true). Slight exaggeration there and I wish I'd looked it up before posting.

Despite this, my point (that 3 year depreciation schedules for GPUs was too short) remains correct I think.

[1] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-says-tpu-d...