Most organizations scale AI inference the obvious way: buy more GPUs. But what if the real bottleneck isn't hardware — it's how you deploy it? In a collaboration with Character.AI (~20M users) and AMD, DigitalOcean achieved a 91% throughput improvement with zero additional spend. The breakthrough came from challenging a default assumption about GPU allocation that most teams never question. This talk distills the technical discovery into a strategic framework that engineering leaders and executives can use to evaluate their own AI infrastructure investments. You'll leave with a decision matrix, not a shopping list.