會計學

以下是一則 2025 年 12 月 8 日華爾街日報 (The Wall Street Journal) 報導之摘錄。

The Accounting Uproar Over How Fast an AI Chip Depreciates (The Wall Street Journal, 2025.12.08.)

A debate is raging over the accounting treatment of Nvidia chips and other equipment that tech companies are splurging on. This time, some of the AI companies' critics may be overreaching.

Rarely have investors obsessed over a topic as seemingly banal as the proper depreciation schedule for fixed assets. But when spending on artificial-intelligence infrastructure is in the hundreds of billions of dollars at a handful of the world's biggest companies, the market pays attention.

Michael Burry, the famed investment manager played by Christian Bale in 2015's film "The Big Short," recently added fuel to the fire. "Extending useful life decreases depreciation expense and increases apparent profits," he wrote in an article last month. "It is one of the more common frauds of the modern era and results in overvalued assets and overstated profits."

Whatever the merits of that criticism, some perspective is in order.

This year, for instance, Meta Platforms increased the estimated useful lives for most of its servers and network assets to 5.5 years. It previously said it used a range of four to five years. As recently as 2020, Meta said it used as little as three years.

Meta said the latest extension reduced its depreciation expense by $2.3 billion for the first nine months of 2025. That isn't a small number. But to grasp the scale, its total depreciation expense was almost $13 billion, while pretax profit topped $60 billion.

Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.com also use longer useful lives for similar assets than they did five years ago. Alphabet and Microsoft are at six years, up from three in 2020. Amazon used a four-year period in 2020 and was up to six years by 2024, but this year cut the number to five years for some servers and networking equipment.

Big tech companies for years have drawn investor scrutiny when they have extended the useful lives for the assets they are depreciating. That is understandable, because doing so can boost current earnings by shifting expenses further into the future. It looks cheeky, if not aggressive, for management to increase a year's earnings by billions of dollars with a keystroke, simply by changing an accounting estimate.

If investors someday conclude that much AI investment is being wasted, it won't be due to the depreciation schedules companies have picked. While there are other good reasons to be skeptical of how technology giants are accounting for their AI adventures, the depreciation debate won't move the needle.

試作：

(一) 請評論上述 Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft 及 Amazon.com 四家公司變更折舊年數對於當期及未來財務報表之相關影響為何？公司應如何向投資人說明其變更折舊年數的理由？(10%)

(二) 你是否同意或不同意這四家公司變更折舊年數的理由？有關公司投資 AI 晶片及伺服器相關資產之折舊會計處理，除了折舊年數外，還有哪些應評估之因素？公司應如何決定其適當之會計政策？(10%)