Cloud Architect's 2026 Guide to Cheaper, Faster LLM Inference Three months ago I opened our quarterly cloud spend dashboard and almost choked on my coffee. Our LLM inference line item had ballooned to 14% of the entire infrastructure budget. We were running what I thought was a "moderately busy" multi-region chatbot across US-East, EU-West, and APAC, and the bills told a different story than the dev team Slack channel did. So I did what any cloud architect worth their salt does at 2 AM: I ...