FinOps for AI: The Definitive Overview

FinOps for AI is the practice of applying cloud financial management principles—visibility, allocation, and optimization—to artificial intelligence workloads, including token-based LLM costs, GPU compute, model training, and inference API calls. AI spend behaves differently than traditional cloud resources. A single prompt costs pennies, but thousands of prompts per hour across multiple teams can spiral into significant monthly bills without warning.