Meta Accounting Move on AI Servers to Boost Profit This Year (1)

Meta Platforms Inc. made a small change last month that’s likely to increase the company’s profit by billions of dollars this year.

It wasn’t the release of a new product or cost cuts. It was a tweak to an accounting formula used to measure the depreciation of its expensive artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The change, disclosed in the social-media giant’s earnings materials on Jan. 29, extends the so-called useful life period of certain servers and networking assets to five and a half years, from the four to five years it previously used. While that may sound trivial, its impact on earnings ...