The Cloud Already Showed Us What Renting Your Infrastructure Costs. Now We Rent Competence

The MisconceptionThe comfortable belief goes like this. Renting intelligence is nothing like renting servers. Servers are physical, scarce and sticky. Knowledge is abstract, abundant and portable. You can swap one model for another the way you swap a search engine, and the worst that happens is your prompts need a trim. Infrastructure lock-in was a hardware problem. Competence has no cables. It is a pleasant story, and it has the structure of every pleasant story the industry tells itself at the start of a procurement cycle. It is also, almost word for word, the story we told about the cloud in 2010. Only the nouns have been swapped. The QuestionIf the cloud taught us that renting infrastructure quietly rewrites your cost structure, your architecture and your bargaining position - what happens when the thing on the invoice is the ability to think? Not "will AI take the jobs", which is a different and more tiresome question. This one is narrower and less comfortable. When a company…