AI’s hidden storage bill: What inference leaves behind

Original publisher: MIT Technology Review (www.technologyreview.com)

Canonical URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/22/1146948/ais-hidden-storage-bill-what-inference-leaves-behind/

Summary excerpt

Ask most executives to picture the cost of AI and they’ll likely see GPUs—racks of accelerators with gigawatts of power—and a waitlist for silicon. But that picture leaves something out: Data storage costs. What happens to data after a model responds? Much of the back-end data that’s generated—from billions of daily…