More than a decade after software began eating the world, AI is now eating software. AI is changing the very nature of software: its role in the human ecosystem and how it serves humankind. The consequences of this change are profound and reach into nearly every aspect of human endeavor. The focus here, though, is on the consequences for infrastructure — the cloud, in particular.

As AI devours software, is the cloud the final course in that meal?

The short answer is yes, but not because AI will eliminate the cloud. Rather, AI will dramatically and irrevocably alter it. Specifically, it is generative AI (GenAI) — encompassing large language models (LLMs) , image- and video-generation models, and their orchestration within autonomous agents — that is the most consequential form of AI for cloud infrastructure.

We all know that GenAI is ravenous: ravenous for power, ravenous for computation, and ravenous for storage.…