The restaurant next to the mines were profitable up until the moment the mines themselves shut down: one doesn't exist without the other.

You can't ringfence inference as "the profitable bit" and then hand-wave away the training. Without continuous training there is no inference product.

Claude 3 Opus isn't sitting there making revenue in 2026 - the thing is just deprecated. The moment you stop spending billions on the next model, your "profitable" inference business is on borrowed time until someone else makes it obsolete.

Maybe I made a mistake in my analogy... They're not growing a farm and then selling oranges. They're on a treadmill where stopping is death, and the treadmill costs $10bn a year to keep running.