Best or worst time to start an inference company? Scale economics say brutal
AccBalanced · x · 2026-10-05
jessiedong argues the inference market is growing with long-running tasks consuming more tokens, but small companies face brutal economics: inference is a customer-scale game where Together, Fireworks, AWS and Google can always undercut smaller providers because more customers mean cheaper per-token costs. GPU scarcity compounds the problem — small startups own no compute and are hostage to rising cloud prices.
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