That sounds right about ML startups. But ML startups or even venture funded companies are a very small percentage of companies - especially when it comes to spending signficant dollars.
My original comment was referring to companies who train their own machine learning models. They might not be spending the way large slow corporations and the government do but there's a lot of investment in the space and a ton of room for growth.
A lot of ML startups end up buying hardware for training because they can get a GPU for what it would cost them to rent it for 2 months on GCP/AWS.