Planning for GenAI Inferencing Impact on Infrastructure Investment Decisions

This IDC Perspective explores the experience of organizations that have moved multiple GenAI POCs into production and provides infrastructure tech buyers with important insights about the cost, performance, and security trade-offs that must be balanced to optimize GenAI inferencing infrastructure investments as the expected growth of production-scale GenAI inferencing workloads is poised to put new demands on many organizations' computing, storage, and network infrastructure architectures, budgets, and operational strategies."GenAI inferencing needs to be a top priority for infrastructure decision-makers in 2025 as they rapidly increase the number of use cases running in large-scale production environments," explains Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Digital Infrastructure Strategies at IDC. "Creating LLMs is just the beginning. Inferencing is where users connect to AI analytics. Tech buyers need to consider data gravity and evaluate how to minimize the costs and latency associated with the movement and transformation of data while ensuring that users and AI agents get the answers they need within acceptable time, security, performance, and cost parameters."