I don't see how merging or colluding fixes their problems, though. Both companies burn cash at historic rates because inference costs a lot more than people want to pay for it. Even if they somehow manage to crowd out any competitors and fix the price of AI, that price can't be much higher than it is today or people will just decide to stop paying for it.

No amount of collusion can solve the core economics problem of compute.

They could ~halve their training costs with collusion.

Instead of each paying full price to generate a SOTA model in competition, they could share the result and split the cost. This gets even simpler if they merge.