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