When the accountants come for the hyperscalers
What is the useful life of a GPU and why does that matter?
The Economist recently published an article with the scary headline The $4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud. The subhead reads A beancounter’s look at the hyperscalers’ balance-sheets1.
So what’s going on here?
The Economist is essentially arguing that the AI boom is riding on accounting assumptions as much as silicon. The hypescalers are…