Selling inference is not fundamentally different from selling compute - you amortize the lifetime cost of owning and operating the GPUs and then turn that into a per-token price. The risk of loss would be if there is low demand (and thus your facilities run underutilized), but I doubt inference providers are suffering from this.

Where the long-term payoff still seems speculative, is for companies doing training rather than just inference.

There’s a lot of debate over what the useful lifespan of the hardware is though. A number that seems very vibes based determines if these datacenters are a good investment or disastrous.