Every major AI lab prices inference below cost. When the venture capital subsidizing your five-cent contract review runs out, your AI economics change whether you're ready or not.
Chinese labs aren't just catching up — they're pioneering the techniques Western models adopt, sharing them under open licenses, and training them on chips that weren't supposed to exist.
Every headline called Kirkland's $500M commitment an AI bet. The signals in the announcement — no named model, full exclusivity, value-based pricing — point to something different: an infrastructure play that happens to run AI.