> When they [the hyperscalers] sell capacity in their data centers to AI service providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, these customer contracts typically last several years, meaning their spending pledges are backed by expected revenue.

> And yet, they’d still have to keep forking out money even if Anthropic’s Claude chatbot or OpenAI’s equivalent succumb to competition from cheaper, open-source AI models. That’s not impossible.

The competition still needs datacenters, regardless of the open or closed source nature of the models they serve. They will need to buy the compute from somewhere, and they will have so other place to buy it from but the hyperscalers.