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Training a model is a project with an end date. Inference is what happens for the rest of the model's working life. The two workloads share GPUs, frameworks, and a lot of vocabulary, but the infrastructure decisions that make sense during training are usually the wrong ones in production. Teams that treat inference as "training, but smaller" tend to discover the gap somewhere around their first traffic spike.

Cloud infrastructure has become the backbone of modern business operations. But as organizations deepen their reliance on cloud providers, a critical question often goes unasked: just how dependent are we, and at what cost? For years, the cloud adoption narrative focused on agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. Those benefits remain real. But the landscape is shifting.

AI inference and training are terms you'd run into if you have been around software engineering or even just scrolled through the news. Both are integral to delivering the AI-powered experiences we have come to expect from many of the applications we use daily. According to McKinsey, by 2030 inference will overtake training as the dominant workload in AI data centers, making up more than half of all AI compute and roughly 30-40% of total data center demand.

Enterprise AI has crossed an inflection point. The model problem is largely covered. What remains unsolved is the operational impact: how to run AI inference and agentic processes continuously, reliably, and at a cost that doesn’t cancel out the value. Most enterprises are discovering this the hard way. GPU utilization dashboards show 80%. Actual compute efficiency is half that. Token demand is compounding at 200-500% annually as agents multiply every action into dozens of model calls.

If you’re prepping for your first AI or MLOps interview, the hardest part usually isn’t always the hands-on element. For me, it’s the vocabulary. Interviewers sometimes lob single-word concepts at you (“what’s quantization?”) and watch how far you can carry the thread. The questions sound clear-cut, but each one is really a doorway into a bigger topic, and the interviewer is judging how cleanly you walk through it.

"Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out. Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference, each growing exponentially. We've entered the virtuous cycle of AI." Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA When NVIDIA's CEO makes that statement in a quarterly earnings release, it is not marketing language.