Why It Costs More to Run AI Than to Build It

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Mar 25, 2026 · 22m

As of March 2026, the industry has officially crossed a threshold where more than half of all AI infrastructure spending is dedicated to keeping the lights on through inference rather than training. This shift has placed the AI runtime—the critical software layer between hardware and model weights—at the center of the performance battle. This episode explores the architectural differences between local engines like Ollama and production-grade powerhouses like vLLM, explaining how innovations like PagedAttention and kernel fusion are driving a sixteen-fold increase in throughput. We also dive…