Demand can stop. Depreciation cannot.

The most reassuring number in the market this year is the "confirmed order." The upstream discounts two years of compute demand into a near-trillion-dollar backlog and keeps telling the market that demand is locked, not imagined. Meanwhile another number is spoken of deliberately lightly: the industry now pours close to half a trillion dollars a year of capex into AI, and the revenue that actually monetizes on the enterprise side is still only a fraction of it. Most people read the two as one sentence: demand this certain, spending this justified. But pull the time axis one notch longer and something surfaces that every backlog covers up — it is not on the demand side, it is on the cost side, and it does not stop for a single day.