IBM has decided that the money in artificial intelligence is no longer only in building the cleverest model, but in running it cheaply, and it has put $240m behind that conviction. The company has signed a multi-year agreement with Together AI, a San Francisco startup, to stand up a large-scale AI inference cluster on IBM Cloud, and the pitch is squarely aimed at enterprises trying to trim their AI bills. Businesses want to cut what they spend on AI, open models are gaining genuine traction inside large organisations. For IBM, hosting cheap, open-source inference is a way to pick a fight it might actually win. Whether cheap, open inference proves as sticky and as profitable as its backers hope is the wager the whole sector is quietly making, and a $240m cluster is one of its larger stakes yet.