Rapid hardware depreciation turns proprietary data centers into a toxic liability for consumer platforms.
Because the competitive shelf-life of AI GPUs is compressed to just a few years, leading consumer companies must outsource cloud workloads to avoid the capital drag and construction delays of building their own physical footprint.
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The extreme rate of architectural obsolescence makes direct ownership of custom AI data centers a severe capital depreciation risk compared to longer-lived digital assets.
Apple avoids the immense capital costs and build delays of owning a proprietary data center footprint by outsourcing Siri's advanced cloud reasoning workloads.
The compressed window before current chip generations become obsolete means that physical data center operators face massive financial risks and immediate amortization pressures.
Google is outsourcing huge GPU workloads to SpaceX to bypass its own physical data center building constraints and avoid the capital drag of delayed infrastructure.