It won't generate revenue but investment into ipv4 can be used to build a moat around your cloud business. Anyone who wants to compete with the big cloud vendors now needs not just a global network of data centers and good uplinks, but also a large pool of ipv4 addresses.
It would be very rare that any company passes the wholesale cost directly to the customer. There’s almost always some kind of markup, even for things like “administrative overhead”. Maybe that’s not widespread now, but the clear trend is reduced supply and increasing demand, so the costs will definitely go up.
It might make a bit more sense as justification to raise retail prices, but there is a risk that competition will undercut that price.