This is exactly it.

When you run your AI in the cloud you are trading some privacy and security, as well as higher operating expenses, for convenience and lack of upfront cost. This is no different than any other cloud service.

Go back a decade and everybody said cloud is the only future, companies will throw their servers in the garbage, etc. Now a lot of companies have moved workloads back on premises because the simple fact is the cloud provider is buying the same servers and has to pay the same price for them you are just paying for that and also for their profit and overhead.

There's also the simple fact that even the best models have proven unsafe to be turned loose without human intervention. So if you have to have a human reviewing the output anyway, why pay a boatload more for slightly better output?

I just hope when this bubble pops there isn't some taxpayer bailout. Let OpenAI go bankrupt if that's what it takes. Let the idiots who financed data centers with blank checks lose their shirts. There needs to be a lesson for the next bubble.