Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Is Now Costing 20% of AI Compute: Someone's Going to Bill You For It
Every abstraction layer in software eventually develops its own tax.
Cloud added an observability tax somewhere between 2013 and 2016, when Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, and the rest quietly became line items running 15 to 30 percent on top of raw infrastructure spend. Nobody planned for that when they were migrating off bare metal. It just accumulated. By the time finance noticed, it was baseline overhead.
Kubernetes added a platform tax around 2018. Service meshes added a service mesh tax around 2020. Every layer of abstraction reaches a moment where the thing that makes it viable in production- the observability, the security, the compliance, the audit trail- becomes a real percentage of the compute bill. The teams that model that tax into their planning from day one end up fine. The teams that assume it away end up in awkward all-hands meetings.
AI just had that moment. Yesterday.
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