When the fed investigates this does it matter if one of the 3 companies is not a publicly traded company?
The issue is that it's an industry of investment which exists solely to power more investment in AI - the entire chain is still assuming that someone will eventually pay for this.
At the end of the day all that money leaks out to employees and suppliers...but no one those people transact with may have any interest in buying what was produced.
It's entirely based on the perception that LLM training & inference is here to stay at ever growing scales when the shortcomings of Artificial Dreaming are increasingly scrutinized. Not all businesses want to end up paying refunds to their clients like Deloitte [1] because the LLM hallucinated crap into their reports (and they failed to correct it).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi...
This assumes Deloitte didn't make more $$$ from the deal by "outsourcing" it to AI than not. It was a partial refund.
And you haven't considered that Deloitte might get this money some other way anyway. It's been budgeted and needs to be spent by the government department for this financial year. They'll find another project to hand out.