Why a Single AI Token Dominates Data‑Center Costs
Inference now burns two‑thirds of AI compute and up to 90% of a model’s lifetime cost. This deep‑dive traces a single token through fifteen data‑center hops, exposing the compute‑bound prefill and memory‑bound decode bottlenecks that drive latency and per‑token pricing. Understanding those steps lets engineers budget latency, trim costs, and target the hardware that actually matters.