> While they'd love to reduce their actual costs, they'd only want to do it to the extent they are certain they can keep it secret.

So you are saying that frontier AI labs are spending billions of dollars on datacenters as a form of marketing. And they are colluding to hide the fact that they don't need to.

Of course they profit more if they are in front, but bleeding money to pretend to be in front is not a winning strategy. They can't fool the market if their models are not actually better, and they know this.