I do believe that if OpenAI and others release an open-weight model that is better or on par with their frontier variants, it might ruin their primary business model.
That is, of course, unless they develop their own hardware specifically to run this open model. But, that does ruin the point of open models.
When/if gains slow down, I can definitely see branching out into hardware to sell for on-prem inference once the models can be etched into the silicon with hard wired weight chips. I'd guess maybe at least 5+ years away from that though.
I think this is inevitable. Sooner or later, model-specific ASIC's will make economical sense. We're already seeing it happening with Taalas/Cerebras so I think it's sooner than 5 years. And inference is order of magnitude faster which is amazing.