AI / compute infrastructure
Revenue tied to compute delivery; cost of revenue scales with usage and accelerator supply.
What changes about the finance work: Depreciation life assumptions and power costs are first-order
Relationships pointing at this node.
changes these tasks
2The task exists in this business archetype but behaves differently. The note is the point of the edge: it must say how it differs, not merely that it does.
Useful life for accelerators is a live judgement rather than a policy default — vendors ship new generations faster than the assumed life — and it is first-order to gross margin. The assumption becomes a disclosed and defended estimate that analysts model independently.
Cost per token or per request depends on accelerator depreciation life, cluster utilisation and power price — three assumptions set by finance rather than observed. A change of one year in assumed useful life can move gross margin by tens of points, so the unit economic is only as credible as the depreciation policy behind it.