The Cloud Efficiency Paradox: Why FinOps for AI Is No Longer Just About Cloud Cost
For more than a decade, cloud efficiency has been treated mainly as a problem of infrastructure discipline. Right-sizing virtual machines. Reducing idle capacity. Optimizing storage tiers. Using reserved instances and savings plans. Improving tagging. Allocating costs to teams, products, applications and environments. All these practices still matter. But they were designed for a world in which the main units of cost were relatively familiar: servers, containers, databases, storage, network traffic and managed cloud services. Artificial intelligence changes that equation.