https://belski.me/tags/mlops/Recent content in MLOps on Vadzim Belski — AI Research & EngineeringHugoenSat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://belski.me/blog/ai_inference_providers_2026_free_tier_deep_dive/Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://belski.me/blog/ai_inference_providers_2026_free_tier_deep_dive/<h2 id="the-market-shift">A Structural Shift in AI Inference</h2> <p>Something significant has happened in the AI infrastructure market over the past 18 months. The combination of open-weight frontier models, custom accelerator silicon &mdash; Groq LPUs, Cerebras WSE, SambaNova RDU &mdash; and intense competition among cloud platforms has created an environment where substantial LLM inference is now available at <strong>zero cost</strong>.</p> <p>For CTOs and data teams, this means that prototyping, evaluation, dataset curation, and even production-scale pipelines can be launched without infrastructure budget. Three providers now offer 1 million or more tokens per day completely free. NVIDIA NIM offers 91 free endpoint models spanning not just language but vision, biology, simulation, and safety. The question is no longer whether you can afford to experiment &mdash; it&rsquo;s which provider to use for which task.</p>