> 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/