Your logic seems highly flawed. I get what you are saying in the example, yes the government provides weapons which are paid for by the government but produced by defense companies.
But in the Microsoft example it is customers who are paying Microsoft to use OpenAI via Azure. Thats a free market of money inflows. Same with all the people using OpenAI directly. Not sure how you would even think of the money being recycled in this scenario. Yes of course there is some back scratching in the sense that Microsoft invested in OpenAI with a large portion of that investment in Azure credits which makes the investment quite nice from MSFT's side but there is still real demand for Azure services to use OpenAI apis.
For big enterprises it is either included in existing licenses (i.e. Microsoft Word has ChatGPT embedded) or pilots. No one is cutting massive checks to Microsoft specifically for OpenAI services.
This is obvious, but if you need some journalist to validate what is already logically clear:
I can see how its easy to get confused in this area but there are indeed large checks gettign written for using services like OpenAI or Anthropic.
You are really conflating too many things at once.
1) Yes, big tech is having a hard time monetizing their bespoke AI tooling within their own ecosystem.
2) Yes, big tech has made investments in the AI space where they are providing a portion of that funding as credits to use in their cloud offerings.
3) Here is where you are incorrect though. Companies are writing large checks for the raw compute/access to AI models. It is true across the spectrum of Azure OpenAI, OpenAI directly, AWS Bedrock etc, there are a lot of companies both big and small using these services heavily. To think otherwise is naive.
The investment is massive, but real tangible products that have purchasers for sustainable contracts is miniscule. We are in the experimental phase and hype cycle, and the trough of despair is next. I do think real products will come from this, but the actual productivity enhancements at the scale necessary to justify the investment have not materialized.
But in the Microsoft example it is customers who are paying Microsoft to use OpenAI via Azure. Thats a free market of money inflows. Same with all the people using OpenAI directly. Not sure how you would even think of the money being recycled in this scenario. Yes of course there is some back scratching in the sense that Microsoft invested in OpenAI with a large portion of that investment in Azure credits which makes the investment quite nice from MSFT's side but there is still real demand for Azure services to use OpenAI apis.