Yes but paying massively inflated prices for compute are not anymore. Even for consumer gear I am being quoted prices that are more than 2x what they were only a year ago (and availability is hard).

But its impact on new hardware costs and replacement costs is not.

A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long.

And yet the hardware cost increases caused by AI are not.