Should Your Company Self-Host an AI? Four Things to Think Through First (2026)
“Can our company self-host an AI? We don’t want our data going outside” — the question we’ve been asked most often lately. Yes, you can — but before you spend money on hardware, think through four things: (1) when self-hosting is genuinely worth it (data that cannot leave the internal network is the only reason that needs no cost-benefit math); (2) hardware is not just about buying a good GPU — VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth decide success or failure, and the golden rule for choosing a model is not to look at total parameter count alone; (3) the most valuable point: across three “it’s slow” investigations, not one turned out to be a hardware problem — thinking mode left on meant a long wait for an empty reply, output filed into the wrong field, and the real bottleneck was time to first token (with the right caching, from over ten seconds to under two); (4) factor operations manpower into the budget. Plus a suggested three-step path: spend a few hundred RMB validating the use case with an online service first, then decide whether to spend tens of thousands.