An 800G switch can remain serviceable long after the network around it has changed direction, leaving an operator with functioning equipment that no longer fits the intended design of the next computing cluster. The difficulty emerges when procurement teams evaluate equipment against its purchase price, expected service life, and planned replacement date without accounting for changes in signaling, optical integration, rack density, and network topology. Depreciation records describe how an organization allocates an asset’s cost over its useful life, while an architecture roadmap describes whether that asset will continue to serve the workloads and interconnection patterns that justify its deployment. A switch can therefore retain substantial operational value while losing its suitability for the most demanding part of an AI network, particularly when new compute generations change the balance between bandwidth, latency, power consumption, and physical connectivity.