Michael Burry Sounds Alarm on $176B Depreciation Gap among Tech Giants

Tiger Newspress
11/12

Famed investor Michael Burry has sounded a new alarm, targeting Big Tech's accounting practices.

Burry, who had famously predicted the 2008 financial crisis, said that major cloud and AI infrastructure companies are artificially inflating profits by extending the "useful life" of their assets.

“Understating depreciation by extending the useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings—one of the more common frauds of the modern era,” Burry wrote on social media platform X.

Last week, Burry’s Scion Asset Management took bearish positions in AI darlings NVIDIA and Palantir Technologies Inc., as he hinted at caution toward the artificial intelligence trade that has boosted a lot of this year's market rally.

In the most recent post, Burry highlighted that hyperscalers have been aggressively increasing their capital expenditure through purchases of Nvidia chips and servers that usually last only two to three years.

According to Burry, extending these assets' lifespan on paper lets firms spread the depreciation expenses over longer periods, which then lowers reported costs and inflates net income. As per Burry's estimates, these adjustments will lead to a cumulative $176 billion understatement of depreciation between 2026 and 2028.

He further estimated that Oracle and Meta Platforms, Inc. will overstate earnings by 26.9% and 20.8%, respectively, by 2028. Burry also shared a chart that showed how firms have gradually increased their reported useful lives since 2020.

Meta’s network equipment lifespan rose from 3 years to 5½ by 2025, Alphabet from 3 to 6, and Oracle’s from 5 to 6. Microsoft made a similar shift, extending to six years by 2025.

Amazon.com's network equipment lifespan rose from 4 years in 2020 to 6 years in 2024 and then decreased to 5 years in 2025.

"We follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. In Q4 2024 we completed a useful life study for our servers and networking equipment and observed an increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of AI and ML, which resulted in a decrease in the useful lives for a subset of our servers and networking equipment from 6 years to 5 years, beginning Jan 2025," Amazon's Angie Quennell said in an emailed statement to Seeking Alpha.

Burry added he will provide more details on November 25.

Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to Seeking Alpha's request for comments.

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