5 Engineering Strategies to Cut Your AI Infrastructure Costs — Without Sacrificing Performance

The AI industry is pouring $690B into infrastructure in 2026. Yet most engineering teams can’t answer a basic question: how much does a single AI-powered feature actually cost to run? Organizations are overspending 40-60% beyond their AI budgets. Token costs have dropped 280x in two years, but total spending keeps climbing - because usage is growing faster than prices are falling. The problem isn’t that AI is expensive. The problem is that most teams have zero visibility into where the money goes - and even fewer have systems in place to optimize it.