The Real AI Hardware Story Isn't Capex—It's Inference Efficiency. While investors obsess over data center spending, the actual competitive battlefield is shifting to edge optimization: llama.cpp's relentless release cadence (5 builds in this window) and vLLM's incremental improvements signal that whoever cracks cheap, fast local inference wins the war, not whoever builds the biggest GPU farm. Naver's 6% stock hit despite a $10B Nvidia deal proves markets now punish companies for *needing* massive capex rather than rewarding it—the infrastructure arms race is becoming a liability, not an asset. Watch inference optimization frameworks obsessively; ignore the "AI capex boom is unstoppable" narrative.