Situation A:
You're Amazon. You give OpenAI $50B cash investment, they then hand you back the $50B over time because they buy $50B worth of Amazon AWS services (they would use AWS or other equivalent compute anyway). OpenAI pays an additional $1-5B in sales taxes on top of their $50B compute purchase. Now let's say you have $25B opex for said compute. You then have $25B profits, you pay 21% corporate taxes on the profits, so you too owe the government about $5B. Government collects around $6-10B on this whole transaction.
Situation B:
You're Amazon. You let OpenAI use your services by handing them API credentials that unlock what would normally cost $50B worth of services, but no money changes hands. You have zero revenue from the transaction, write off the $25B opex as a tax loss on your other profits elsewhere in the company. You thus pay ~$5B less tax on your other income as a company, and OpenAI also doesn't have to pay sales tax because they didn't actually purchase anything.
Isn’t sales tax only for consumers? Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely. Or what is this 2% - 10% sales tax you’re referring to?
You have to report barter transactions as income. And Amazon already pays 0% corporate income tax.