The Hidden Storage Costs of AI Inference: The Data Bill Accumulating Behind Every Response
As the scale of generative AI inference surges, enterprises are facing significantly underestimated backend data storage costs—including logs, caches, intermediate rendering, security records, and more—often amounting to tens to hundreds of times the size of the user-visible output. IDC research shows that 95% of surveyed companies experienced an increase in data volume over the past year due to AI, with 61% reporting growth exceeding 25%, while storage spending has already begun outpacing compute budgets.