> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.

There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.

The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.

The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.

How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?

I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.