> Amortize that over a couple years, and it's cheaper than most people spend on a car payment.

I'm not parsing that: do you mean that the monthly cost of running your own 24x7 is less than the monthly cost of a car payment?

Whether true or false, I don't get how that is relevant to proving either that the current LLMs are not subsidised, or proving that they are.

If true it means there's a lower bound that is profitable at least taking into account current apparent purchasing costs and energy consumption.