Cloud Economics & Sovereignty
Cloud bills rarely blow up on compute — they blow up on egress, lock-in, and architecture decisions nobody revisits. Here's where I work through what actually drives the spend, when "just put it in the cloud" stops being the cheap answer, and how to keep control of your own stack.
54 items, 2023 to 2026.
Frameworks
- Sovereign AI Data residency is one control in a larger AI sovereignty model. Score data, models, operations, jurisdiction and exit paths before you choose a deployment.
- FinOps for AI AI spend scales with autonomy, not traffic. The circuit breakers, tier routing, caching, and chargeback discipline that keep LLM and agent spend answerable to somebody.
- Cloud Repatriation A decision framework for 2026 — the real survey data, a workload scoring matrix, a 3–5 year TCO model, and the risks. Repatriation as portfolio management, not ideology.
- FinOps Maturity Cloud cost control is a capability you grow, not a dashboard you buy. The maturity ladder from raw visibility to unit economics — and the practices on each rung.
- Economic Sovereignty From cloud chaos to cost control — the framework for regaining economic independence from hyperscaler lock-in.
- AI Cost Curves When API costs cross the self-hosting line — the economics that drive AI infrastructure decisions, and how to spot the crossover before it hits your bill.
Talks
Writing
- FinOps for AI Metrics: The Scorecard That Turns Token Spend into Decisions The practical AI FinOps metrics that connect token, GPU, retrieval and agent cost to accountable operational and business decisions.
- Data Residency Is Not Sovereign AI A local model region answers one question about location. Sovereign AI also requires control of prompts, embeddings, model provenance, operations, jurisdiction and a tested exit path when conditions change.
- FinOps for AI: Why Your LLM Bill Is Exploding — and How to Stop It Traditional cloud bills scale with traffic. AI bills scale with autonomy — and an agent stuck in a loop spends like an intern with a corporate credit card. The circuit breakers, caching, and chargeback discipline that keep agentic spend answerable to somebody.
- Cloud Repatriation Is Portfolio Management, Not Ideology The repatriation conversation has become tribal — cloud believers vs data-centre revivalists. Both camps are wrong. The right question is workload-by-workload: where do the economics, performance, and compliance of this specific system land?
- Build vs Buy: The Decision Framework Every CTO Gets Wrong Why the build-vs-buy decision is never binary, how to think about total cost of ownership, and the hybrid approach that actually works in practice.
- AI Cost Curves: When API Pricing Becomes Your Biggest Infrastructure Decision API inference wins until about 25,000 queries a day — where $12,000 a month of self-hosted capacity meets $0.016 a query. Most workloads end up hybrid.
- The Cloud Cost Crisis Is Undermining AI Innovation How hyperscaler pricing models and data egress fees constrain innovation, and why portable architectures, distributed systems, and open ecosystems are the way forward.
- Cloud Was Never Meant to Be Cheap—Especially Not at Hyperscale Why cloud cost depends on architecture and workload shape rather than scale, and how distributed models outperform hyperscale for AI-driven, data-gravity-bound workloads.
In the press
All in the press →- Why Digital-Native Organisations Aren't Betting on Hyperscalers
- State of Cloud 2026: From AI Hype to Real-World Value
- Chancen und Herausforderungen der KI und Cloud-Lösungen
- Build Cost-Aware Cloud Strategy Without Vendor Lock-In
- From FinOps to ValueOps: Solving Cloud Cost Intelligence with AI
- How to Design Cloud Infrastructure That Survives Major Outages
- Why Hyperscale AI Models Are Too Expensive for Most Use Cases
- How AI is Reshaping Cloud Economics and Multi-Cloud Strategy