AI infrastructure costs in 2026: what the stack is, what each layer costs, and how much to commit
AI infrastructure costs span four buying tiers in 2026: API-only teams spend hundreds to tens of thousands per month on tokens, GPU renters typically pay $2 to $10 per GPU-hour by chip class, committed-capacity buyers sign six-to-eight-figure reservation contracts, and owners spend millions per rack. The stack has six layers, and most budgets underestimate everything below the GPU line.