If they had to actually fund R&D and footprint expansion with customer money: Absolutely yes. But, that's exactly what VC money is for. If VC money can cover expansion while customer money can cover per-token incremental costs, eventually they won't need to expand quite as much, and then profitability should catch up.

In other words: How literally every tech business that has ever worked has worked. This isn't news. This isn't novel. This is just how it works.

If you want me to feel fright that the world is coming to an end, wake me up when Google (one of the world's largest frontier AI labs by any measure) isn't posting $35B in profit on a 39% gross margin every quarter, or when Meta (who is reported to be paying AI researchers nine figure comp packages) isn't making $16B on 40%. The amount of money these companies make is disgusting, its so disgusting that they can blow a hundred billion on GPUs and key people, they could write it all to zero two years later, and its all a teeny tiny little blip on their graphs, it becomes the third line-item in their quarterly board meetings, behind far more important stuff. The reason why some of you get so freaked out is because you literally cannot comprehend the scale these companies operate at, and how financialized their operations are.