No, it wasn't. Cloud computing was almost immediately profitable.

And Amazon was famously "unprofitable" for their first 9 years because they were investing all their very real profits into a form of capital that the US tax code didn't recognize.

Yes, there exist cloud computing companies that took a long time to be profitable. IDK if Oracle ever was.

Cloud computing was still profitable the entire time. Amazon alone could cover all of GCP expenses.

You are being downvoted but only a few years ago Google contemplated whether to kill GCP altogether because of lack of traction in the market or revenue goals.

IIRC Amazon chose to reinvest early revenue to grow AWS intentionally, and the revenue curve eventually evened out and obviously surpassed expenses. The problem with the AI buildout is that there's not a ton of evidence that these companies are approaching profitability, we can't even know because they're private.

Amazon's incubation of AWS was methodical and transparent. OpenAI is saying that they don't expect to be profitable until at least 2030, with over a trillion dollars in committed spend before that point. It's the largest "trust me bro" play in human history.

the same type of people will eventually hate it when AI actually starts profiting at which point they will ask for redistribution.

damned if you do.

damned if you don't.

if all of humanity's knowledge was redistributed to AI labs to sell back to us, it's only fair that some of the profits get redistributed back.

Apples to oranges