Our cloud bill exploded after AI went live

Originally published on lavkesh.com Our AI feature was humming, then the cloud bill tripled overnight, and nobody had warned us about that part. For three years the industry chased bigger training runs, bragging about model size, data volume, and benchmark scores. Training makes headlines, but it’s a one‑off expense. In early 2026 inference spend finally overtook training spend. Fifty‑five percent of AI cloud infrastructure now powers inference, up from about thirty percent three years ago...