If people were not consuming their services they would not be buying inference hardware at this rate so it's pretty much on consumers.
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
It is more expensive? yeah
Is it "definitely not below cost"? hardly
except if as cost here only the inference cost is considered, and not the capital investment, and maintenance costs (not to mention r&d, marketing, and others).
to put it another way, if they just had the corporate API subs today, would they be profitable?