Enterprise AI Adoption Stalls As Inferencing Costs Confound Cloud Customers
- Reference: 0178042057
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/13/210224/enterprise-ai-adoption-stalls-as-inferencing-costs-confound-cloud-customers
- Source link:
> [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.
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> Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. "Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization," said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. "As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators," she added.
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> Canalys researcher Yi Zhang said many AI services follow usage-based pricing models that charge on a per token or API call basis. This makes cost forecasting hard as the use of the services scale up. "When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios," Zhang said. "As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized." [...] According to Canalys, cloud providers are aiming to improve inferencing efficiency via a modernized infrastructure built for AI, and reduce the cost of AI services.
The report notes that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud "continue to dominate the IaaS and PaaS market, accounting for 65 percent of customer spending worldwide."
"However, Microsoft and Google are slowly gaining ground on AWS, as its growth rate has slowed to 'only' 17 percent, down from 19 percent in the final quarter of 2024, while the two rivals have maintained growth rates of more than 30 percent."
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/cloud_costs_ai_inferencing/
The cloud is a trap (Score:2)
Run away
AI needs local compute
Re: (Score:2)
It depends.
It's kind of like people who insist that renting an apartment is worse financially than owning a home. It depends.
If you move every year or two, renting is a much better deal than buying. If you move to a new city and don't yet know what part of town you want to live in, renting is better. If you don't have the ability or desire to maintain your own place / grounds / HVAC, renting is better.
On the other hand, if you are stable, stay put, are raising a family, and are able and willing to maintain
AI isn't cheap (Score:2)
For all the hype about AI being cheaper than human labor, the truth isn't so clear. Human call center workers, for example, make maybe $10 per hour, and in that hour, they can take a dozen or more calls, depending on the complexity. AI equivalents, by contrast, often license their tools per use, per call, per command, etc. It's not at all clear that the cost/benefit ratio will swing in favor of AI in the near future.
Those "free" AI tools you get from the big providers? Those are loss leaders, getting peopl
20+% growth is stalling? (Score:2)
Nice click bait headline. 20% growth is hardly stalling.
Re:20+% growth is stalling? (Score:4, Insightful)
For a get-rich-quick scheme based on lies? Yes, that is stalling.