"There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months."
This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi, dubai, northern europe, etc. oil-derived funds - all spending billions of dollars doing exactly that and getting something done.
The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. The commonly asserted use cases are the following:
Chatbots Developer tools RAG/search
Not a one of these is going to generate $10 of additional revenue per sollar spent, nor likely even $2. Optimizing your customer services representatives from 8 conversations at once to an average of 12 or 16 is going to save you a whopping $2 per hour per CSR. It just isn't huge money. And RAG has many, many issues with document permissions that make the current approaches bad for enterprises - where the money is - who as a group haven't spent much of anything to even make basic search work.