this also misunderstands the data center rollout itself. openai and anthropic etc aren't building any data centers. they're promising to buy billions of compute and 3rd party companies are taking those promises and using them to fund the construction of data centers which will then lease out that compute back to them. so it's not actually a capital construction project at all. CoreWeave or whoever is making the capital investment. OpenAI is just promising to make that a good investment.
I mean that's not entirely true
https://openai.com/index/building-ai-infrastructure-with-the...
Yeah, Open AI and Anthropic may be buying the bulk of their compute from other providers but they are now moving into building their own infrastructure directly. There is a scale beyond which it makes more sense to build vs. rent