Until China sees it valuable to fund open weights SOTA-ish models, even the winner might struggle. There is very little capture - protocols are mostly standard so models are mostly interchangeable and if you are trying to raise prices enough to break even on the whole operation, somebody else can probably profitably run inference cheaper.
"oh look, with open weights now everyone can run this quadrillion param 'superintelligent' model. but what's that? only we have the power capacity and cheap $/W to actually serve it? funny thing...!"
