AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

Re:AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt by FabHK on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:23PM (#49028220)

If you're talking about dodgy accounting at hyperscalers, a larger worry might be that they are overstating profits by depreciating their assets (such as datacenters and CPUs/GPUs) too slowly.

Estimates are that this could overstate profits by tens of percent. (However, this only allows earnings to be "pulled forward" - sooner or later the servers must be written off and the accounting catches up.)

See e.g. https://deepquarry.substack.com/p/depreciation-of-gpus-betwe...

https://www.ft.com/content/0dbfe94f-2136-432c-b075-4587092de...

Michael “The Big Short” Burry:

> Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings -one of the more common frauds of the modern era.

https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1987918650104283372

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Re:AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt by aphysically on Thursday July 23, 2026 @06:24PM (#49028861)

They’re talking about accounting at big tech and not hyperscalers

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Re:AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt by polski-g on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:36AM (#49031268)

H100 rental costs are increasing.

If anything those GPUs should not be marked down at all.

Burry is wrong.

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Re:AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt by zipy124 on Friday July 24, 2026 @07:31AM (#49034059)

Is this true? The best data I could find is that A100 costs are decreasing slightly, H100's have been holding steady and B-series have been increasing?

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Re:AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt by polski-g on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:18PM (#49091310)

https://x.com/i/status/2082168950649979109

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