Selling inference is not fundamentally different from selling compute - you amortize the lifetime cost of owning and operating the GPUs and then turn that into a per-token price. The risk of loss would be if there is low demand (and thus your facilities run underutilized), but I doubt inference providers are suffering from this.

Where the long-term payoff still seems speculative, is for companies doing training rather than just inference.

Pretty much every major American inference provider claims to make a profit on API-based inference. Consumer plans might be subsidized overall, but it's hard to say since they're a black box and some consumers don't fully use their plans

Google definitely makes money in other areas. Do they make money on inference?