I have been saying this for a while.
It was only a matter of time until someone started running the much cheaper Chinese models on US-based infrastructure.
Until now, you could still argue:
"Who wants to send sensitive data to a Chinese provider?"
Healthcare, defense, government, finance - for many of them this was basically a no-go.
But if the same model runs on US-hosted hardware, with a US-based inference provider, many of those objections get weaker.
And then it gets interesting.
What happens when investors realize that maybe 50-70% of enterprise AI use cases don't need OpenAI or Anthropic at all?
Maybe they run fine on:
- cheaper hosted models
- open-weight models
- local models
- or some future box of GPUs nobody had on their bingo card
The big frontier models may still be needed for the hard stuff.
But if only 10-20% of workloads really need them, the ROI story looks very different.
That is where the card house starts to shake a bit.