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Amortizing a 25% project IRR requires revenue duration that matches the debt maturity. Hardware depreciates on an eighteen-month cycle while open weights compress per-token pricing every quarter, leaving late-cycle cash flows exposed against fixed-rate coupons.

Sorry, just to clarify… you're arguing the effective return drops below the coupon because rapid depreciation and falling token costs squeeze late-cycle cash flows? Token pricing compressing, but with a 25% base IRR against an 8% coupon, there's a wide MoE before debt service actually underwater

And actual economic life proving longer than expected (Amazon said that recently, a16z showed that with their rental price chart)

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That margin vanishes because rental rates float while power and coupons are fixed. When new silicon offers 3x FLOPs per watt, legacy clusters can't sustain pricing without losing utilization. In a high-fixed-cost asset, a 40% drop in realized revenue wipes out the equity cushion entirely.