Infrastructure and compute: Enterprises are buying AI compute for speed while flying blind on what it costs

Across 170 enterprises, AI infrastructure has moved decisively into production — two-thirds now run AI workloads live and three in 10 run them at scale — while the ability to account for what that infrastructure costs has not kept pace. Enterprises have quietly demoted cost in the buying decision: performance and GPU availability now outrank total cost of ownership, and reliability outranks price as the measure of success. That reordering is rational for teams under production pressure, but it lands on an uncomfortable fact — fewer than half can rigorously track what their AI compute costs, most GPUs still run at half capacity or less, and the next dollar is aimed at specialized clouds that fewer than one in twenty of them actually use.This wave of VentureBeat Pulse Research examines enter