To make things worse, hardware prices have spiked, due to AI companies.

Fairly sure data center construction costs are also going up (they require so many resources that everything is constrained at the moment, especially electricity production).

So I don't understand in what world these frontier AI companies can somehow become profitable. The basic tech they're using is basically the same. Yes, around the edges there are a lot of things that can be done, and were done, like caching, batching, mixture of experts, etc, but basically everyone has done all of that by now, and they're still losing money.

So:

Total costs going up a lot - revenues per unit not increasing proportionally, if anything, Chinese models are forcing those down.

How does that math work out to profits? I don't see it.

Or about as bad, after trillions of dollars in investments over multiple years, let's say the entire frontier AI sector has a total profit of $20bn by 2030. In what world does that make sense? Assuming they can scale that total profit to $100bn in 2035 without investing another cent from 2027 to 2035 (utterly ridiculous), the return on investment would happen in roughly 20 years.