If you picked A, you’re thinking like a traditional accountant. The answer is **C**. Unlike real estate or fiber optic cables, AI chips depreciate with brutal speed. Compute power doubles roughly every 18 months. A four-year-old GPU cluster isn’t just "used." It is economic dead weight—too slow to train top models, too power-hungry to run cheap ones. This creates the "Expense Spiral." Tech giants aren't building a permanent asset. They are running on a hamster wheel, forced to burn their entire war chest every 48 months just to stay in the exact same place.