MIT Technology Review指出,AI推理产生的缓存、日志与中间状态存储开销,常被忽略却占总TCO 30%以上。
Empirical analysis shows KV cache persistence, prompt history archiving, structured output logging, and RAG vector index updates contribute 32–47% of LLM service TCO — dwarfing GPU compute costs in many high-concurrency scenarios. Critically, these costs scale non-linearly with request volume and lack standardized observability tooling, causing teams to discover bottlenecks only during late-stage load testing. For early AI teams, this implies three immediate actions: prioritize models with cache-efficient attention (e.g., PagedAttention support); embed storage cost telemetry into API gateways from day one; and adopt compressible, trimmable intermediate representations — because infrastructure cost predictability starts with visibility into what your model *leaves behind*.