> The better they get, the more they need a data center.

That's true.

> So, the ‘better’ Chinese AI gets , the more it will just be a service run on Chinese hardware competing with ‘our’ lower latency AIs .

This is not. Them being open models means that any hosting provider in the world can host them as well. You get to pick and choose the provider the same way you'd pick and choose where to run a Linux server.

The cost of inference is not insurmoutable for many corporations who may run a small datacenter out of their headquaters or branch offices. Larger models absolutely have a higher barrier of entry, but its a cost under a few hundred thousand as opposed to the millions necessary for a datacenter built as core revenue generating infrastructure.

Cost of inference is small when compared to the cost of training new models. Which is the real advantage these Chinese models have. Someone else has already spent the capital needed to create the model.

With a reasonable upfront investment and a few trained staff, its very possible to run these larger Chinese models in a well managed fashion. The real calculus is if this up-front investment and associated lifecycle costs are over or under the costs a corporation may simply wish to dump into a cloud managed service like OpenAI.