It won’t last. There’s a massive incentive to build more GPUs and develop specialized chips and everyone who can is scrambling to meet that demand. The technology is not some trade secret that no one can copy which is why there are so many people and companies diving into this market now. Hardware is a bit slow to ramp up production of but it will get there eventually because there’s money to be made.

Does that matter when the models they generate are given away for free?

You can make your argument validly against DALL•E or Midjourney families, but we've also got the Stable Diffusion family of models that anyone can just grab a copy of.