Based on Microsoft's apparent losses on CoPilot, I suspect the latter. My initial research on ML usage suggested the thing wasn't profitable when commoditised which it well and truly is now hence why I've avoided investing in it (wisely so far). The energy cost versus capital cost versus actual utility makes it a net negative ROI for the technology supplier. The industry is currently living on some vain hope that hardware improvements will decrease cost enough for it to be profitable. With die and process shrinks starting to get problematic (3nm isn't going as well as people want it to) and increasing energy costs, cost reductions are unrealistic.

> not sure if they are very profitable and have no need for additional money

You’re going to make someone choke on their drink. The idea that a US tech mogul, and Sam Altman at that¹, would decide “you know what, I think I have enough money” is the realm of bad science fiction.

¹ Sam used to be the president of Y Combinator (i.e. a startup accelerator) and founded the Worldcoin cryptocurrency scam: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

It seems that people would be willing to pay even more for the service for the value they are getting. And I think in near future such services will diversify. Some becoming very expensive and providing high value. Which will further increase the power of money. This time also connecting it with access to knowledge. For now, public knowledge, but a deal where say Amazon AI has access to all digitized books and provides spotify-like earnings - yes in multiple meanings of that phrase - seems like a possibility.

I'm pretty sure money isn't the reason they halted. Suitable datacenters don't grow on trees.

a saddle point