So all those hundreds of billions of dollars investors ploughed into OpenAI was just a gift was it? No expectation of a return of any kind? What if that investment money was originally borrowed by the investors?

Investment isn’t debt, but investment and debt demand revenue in functionally identical ways, and OpenAI has taken an enormous amount of investment, so they are subject to broadly the same pressures as a hypothetical company that had borrowed lots, no?

Isn't investment like a form of debt, or well obligation to make returns?

If VC provide you funds, there is an expectation of returns, otherwise the board would vote you out.

Yeah it's not a traditional loan from a bank, but it's not a 0% interest loan either.

Exorbitant Cloud costs and spending 22 million to solve a 1 million dollar maths problem isn’t investment though.

The duopoly AI labs haven't technically borrowed much, but a metric ass-ton of money has been borrowed by various other entities in service of them as infrastructure proxies.

That's what is driving up the cost of debt and teetering some of these companies into junk status.