New Delhi, Sept. 1 -- India's AI startup ecosystem is entering a phase where building a working AI product is no longer the only challenge. As startups move from experimentation to production, infrastructure decisions are becoming closely tied to their ability to control costs, handle rising workloads, and meet enterprise requirements.

For early-stage founders, cloud credits can make experimentation easier. But the infrastructure choices made during that period can also influence how a product is built for years. Once usage grows, startups can face a different set of challenges around inference costs, storage, networking, observability, data governance and portability.

The same shift is visible in the conversation around AI compute. Whi...