There is no subsidy in interference. Serving existing models is a highly profitable business. The proofs are many independent companies serving models for profit.

What is expensive is model development and training, but again, that's nothing inherent to technology. It's just that Anthropic and other western vendors made a business decision to use cheap investors money to brute force a new model development and market grab instead of investing in cost optimizations for model training and inference like Chinese model developers and providers.